A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I ran a modded server on an i5-4690K for about 5 people and never noticed any hiccups. The CPU was almost always maxed out due to other things (Frigate camera transcoding, Plex streaming, torrenting) and it ran fine.
How many people will be playing and will there be lots of mods?
It really depends on the mods. Stock Minecraft and even many mods would run fine on a potato, but some of the bigger mods actually require quite a bit of CPU/overhead.
There are also various mods that require certain (older) versions of Java etc to run, and those versions of Java may have known security issues.
I don't think there are benchmarks specifically for hosting minecraft, but I guess general purpose benchmarks can give you a pretty good estimate. You could spin up a server on your homelab and just stress-test it a bit to see if it is noticeably worse than the other instance. You'll have to weigh the saved costs against the (likely) worse performance. on a side note: there are great options to make minecraft playable on servers with less CPU power, like using i.e. a paper server, performance mods, or lowering the renderdistance and 'faking' more renderdistance with client-side mods like bobby or distant horizons.
Minecraft loves single core performance, so it will likely behave differently to most general benchmarks.
But that also makes dedicating a few cores to it and everything else to other services.
World simulation (ticks) is single-threaded, but things like world generation are multithreaded. I'd recommend Paper as server software as it's more performant out of the box (vs. vanilla) and configurable (ex. how many threads world generation is allowed to use).
If you host multiple worlds I recommend spinning up a Paper instance for each world separately and connect them with Velocity.
Ryzen 7000 should have better single-threaded performance than your i5-9500 but as it's a VM ymmv depending on whether Sparked Host overprovisions their machines.
when i was buying hardware my main concern was my mc servers performance however since its really only me playing on it i didn't make it the focus of my pruchase. currently im using ms-01 with 12th gen i5 proxmox cluster with storage over nfs on a qnap ts-932px running 5x hdd in raid 5 there is an ssd cache but its running all 12 of my active vms and no performance hits so far
I successfully ran a modded java minecraft server for me and my friends for years on an ancient thinkstation with a xeon E5430 (quad core 2.6 ghz w/ddr3 ram) doing double duty as a NAS. That old xeon couldn't carry your i5's jock on single core performance, which is your main concern. As long as you're not running huge kitchen sink packs with giant complex bases I think you'll be fine.