PHP 7.2+ is recommended. If you have amper knowledge about hosting any shared hosting provider with ssh access should suffice. There are some discussions around here that offer user experiences on those.
OakleyHippo sounds like you ran into some troubles, no need to hijack this discussion to mention that specifically without having asked for assistance first let's stick to your discussion to get them resolved. Also, local environments are usually extremely specific and badly set up, so there's no reason to scare someone in believing Flarum cannot be used.
