Also (and thank you again for dealing with my stupid newbie questions)
if I used dreamhost, am I facing wordpress censorship, or I go back to your / the commenter at the creeping sharia takedown article who describes hiding plugins so it doesn’t look like wordpress?
(thats starting to sound way over my head)
I see Branco using klicked.com to manage his very politically incorrect cartoon website; starts at $35/month with little free support but includes them selling the advertising...
No, dreamhost won't censor you or cave to politics and wordpress.com or wordpress open source project doesn't have a say in that. Also since dreamhost is a shared wordpress server, you don't get to choose whether to hide or not. They decide that. They probably don't hide, I don't think it would pay off for them.
You would use the wordpress hider if you go the bare VPS route (e.g. linode, digital ocean at $5/month) and do the LAMP installation like this: https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/install-wordpress-5-with-apache-on-debian-9/ If that looks crazy to you, then try the shared server instead. After those steps on that how-to, you will still need to do the wordpress hiding step and a bunch of other security-related changes.
I've used linode, digital ocean, vultr, AWS and dreamhost. My dreamhost account is just a shell account on a shared server. I started using them in 2007 at $8/moth I seem to be gradfathered in at $8/month which is a bit pricey. Oh well, I've been pretty satisfied with their level of service and dedication.