Here are some thoughts on your choice of O/S:

Gentoo
Optimised but low-level so you will need to know what you are doing. Rolling release. Probably not ideal for your situation unless you can get someone experienced to be sysadm (in which case this would be a great choice).
FreeBSD
Solid.
CentOS 7
Old, well supported, but systemd. Goes EoL in 2024. System perl is 5.16.3 (but 5.26 also available) so could well be what is powering your current shared hosting.
Ubuntu 16
Already past EoL. Do not use.
Debian 9
Goes EoL in mid-2022. Why not go for 10?
Ubuntu 18
Well supported, but systemd. Why not go for 20, though?
Debian 10
Solid, released in 2019 but systemd.
CentOS 8
Goes EoL at year end. Consider Rocky or Alma or any of the other relabels instead. Still systemd, however.
Ubuntu 20
Well supported, but systemd. LTS so EoL in 2025.
Disk capacity and bandwidth are sufficient and I imagine 1 Cores and 1Gb RAM would be enough.

If you are going to be running a webserver and a database and a number of persistent perl applications 1GB is unlikely to suffice. However, most VPS providers can easily upgrade the RAM as and when you need it so you can start low and then ramp up as you approach the ceiling.

Don't forget about backups.

🦛

In reply to Re: Linux environment (was: Re^16: Recalcitrant placeholders) by hippo
in thread Recalcitrant placeholders by Bod

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