VPN issue with port forwarding?

Yep. That’s what I’m using myself — their free tier compute instances are insanely generous — such as 24GB 4-core Arm instances and include 10TB of monthly traffic. Just did not want to advertise specific services :). A tiny wireguard + iptables config and bam — your node connects from anywhere; no need for public, let alone static, ip or keeping track of ddns, etc. power up box — it just works.