Best single user practice

I've started using git maybe one month ago, and I'd like to use it for many things including some one-man projects, browser settings backups, and such things. So I always do a local git init, ssh to my server and create a repo there. I copy the .git/config from a working project, and change the remote URL. It all works, but it's not perfect.

- Is it not possible to create a remote repository from my own computer without 
ssh?

- There's only version 1.5.4.3 on the server and I don't want to update it 
unless strongly recommended so. Should I?

- Because of the low version, I can't use "git init --bare" on the server. So I 
create an usual depository and change the configuration to bare=true. Is it OK 
(I really don't mind the repo being placed in DIR/.git instead of DIR itself.)?

- The very first time I need to do "git push origin master", later "git push" 
suffices. I wonder why.

- My local repository created by "git init" (version 1.7.2.3 under cygwin) 
contains
[core]
 repositoryformatversion = 0
 filemode = true
 bare = false
 logallrefupdates = true
 ignorecase = true
but I'd prefer to specify there as little as possible, since the settings for 
all my repositories should be the same (at least for the moment). What can be 
safely removed?

- Sometimes, I use "git push --force", how do I clean up the resulting garbage 
on the server?

- How can I ensure that everything important gets pushed to the server? Maybe 
by using "git push --mirror"? Obviously and logically, .git/config doesn't get 
pushed, but maybe I miss something more important, too?