I started out self hosting on a laptop maybe a little newer than yours. Pentium, 2gb RAM. I’m happier with my pi, but it’s more than enough to get started on. Pretty sure pi-hole will run no problem, the others my struggle a little bit depending on your disk speed.

Your cpu will be a pretty limiting factor, but upgrading the RAM and putting in an SSD could boost the performance quite a bit.

Yes! I got a cheap .tech domain, and it kept increasing price year after year. Eventually it got a lot cheaper to just grab a .com.

Cloudflare has the best prices for domain names, they sell them at cost

Then there’s my code, which didn’t even survive the time change.