A lot of journalists got that wrong in initial reporting. But as an IT administrator you can see where they are coming from with their switch to another platform.

Signal is end user software, and a very good one at that. But it is no enterprise grade software. It lacks the management and policies needed for such user groups, which Wire seems to provide. Things like a mobile number as primary account handle spells ease and low entrance hurdle for end users, and a security problem for administrations.

The fractured nature of the IT in German politics is probably still keeping the attack surface alive. As outlined here by heise:

https://www.heise.de/en/background/Signal-attacks-Political-reality-bites-the-IT-admin-11279251.html

One of my two machines crashed a lot until I moved two Containers to my local server. They are quite small in regards to RAM and at their limit quite fast. Maybe check that.

Also I read somewhere that you could enter credit card details and this kinda upgrades your account in their system though you still do not pay. Something to do with throttling free machines in favor of paid customers.

Oracle has an always free tier which provides two x64 AMD based virtual machines. They are more or less cloud based calculators in terms of performance, but out of experience I can tell you it is more than sufficient for a few docker containers.

European locations are available.

Cloudflare Tunnels work great and are really easy to setup. Plus you are not exposing you machine completely to the outside, as the cloudflared service/container „calls out“, and Cloudflare is your reverse proxy. Downside is, you’re binding yourself to one of the US hyperscalers.

Pangolin uses the same principle, but is a bit more challenging to setup. Plus you need some kind of cloud server to make it work.

As you already have a VPN active at all times (at least it sounds like that), a VPN home seems out of the picture.

Unless you have a dedicated firewall at home, maybe reconsider the reverse proxy route. Personally would not feel comfortable with exposing a machine at home to the internet in full without a handle on what it can do or how it may be reached.