A paid plex share is a plex server that someone is running + selling access too.

This is against plex’ terms, gets plex accounts banned; and in some cases, Plex (co) has taken rather drastic action by blocking entire VPS providers from reaching plex.tv; thus plex server software no longer functions on those VPS’s at all.

Naturally, people selling shares want to maximize profit, so they use VPS providers on the cheaper end; resulting in cheaper VPS solutions being blocked for everyone.

Drink less paranoia smoothie…

I’ve been self-hosting for almost a decade now; never bothered with any of the giants. Just a domain pointed at me, and an open port or two. Never had an issue.

Don’t expose anything you don’t share with others; monitor the things you do expose with tools like fail2ban. VPN into the LAN for access to everything else.

Unless you are behind CGNAT; you would have had the same plug+play experience by using your own router instead of the ISP supplied one, and using DDNS.

At least, I did.