pull down to refresh
reply
It's not a hard requirement, more of an operational best practice.
If you want to use Lightning to actually do stuff other than cost you sats just to play with it, it's best online 24x7 so it can earn you money while you sleep... be that zaps on SN/Nostr, some online store/service you run, or sharing it with guests.
If routing in particular there's a safety element to being online to defend channel state and signal reliability.
A cheap VPS is adequate, Pub configures LND with neutrino so you only need 20GB of disk and 3GB of RAM.
Hetzner, OVH, Racknerd, Hostinger are a few providers that offer adequate VPS's for a few dollars per month.