Comment by simpaticoder

Rent a $5/mo Linux VPS and be happy. I think more people should do this because what you learn (and you'll learn a lot) is the foundation of everything else. Do this even if you are a programmer used to deploying to sophisitcated CI/CD stacks and k8s. The tight resource constraints (e.g. 1G RAM) are good for you - they make you think, and take care what you run and when you run it. Learn to setup ssh on both ends; learn to tail auth.log; learn how to write bash library functions; learn to run podman if you must; learn to update your OS; learn about tmux and htop and a 1000 other things. Literally all of these skills are applicable to everything else - they are elementary. If you ship it you own it and if you think you can avoid learning this stuff you're wrong. Take heart: the stakes are very low so you can make mistakes. The worst that will happen is hackers take over your VPS and ddos someone for a bit and you have to wipe and start over.