Buying a VPS
tl;dr
About $5 a month buys a blank machine in a data centre. Two choices matter — the region, and picking the LTS build of Ubuntu over anything newer.
Time to stop making a server and start renting one. The course uses DigitalOcean, which calls its servers droplets. AWS calls the equivalent EC2, which is less fun.
The reason isn't that DigitalOcean is better — it's that AWS is much more complex and offers a great deal you don't need here. You'd be configuring Route 53 and a pile of adjacent services to do something DigitalOcean does in one form. Its UI also makes it harder to shoot yourself in the foot, which is easy to do when creating or modifying a server.
The choices that matter
| Region | closest to your users | not closest to you — unless it's a dev server, then put it near the developers |
| Data centre | any within the region | DigitalOcean even reminds you of the rule on screen |
| OS | Ubuntu, 64-bit LTS | the one you have to live with |
Region is the one people get backwards. You're developing here, but you're serving them. A high-scale application ends up with servers in every region and good routing to send each user to the nearest one.
Why LTS
LTS is long-term support, and it is the version you want on a server.
The pull toward the bleeding edge is real and you should resist it. Think like an enterprise developer instead: newest is buggiest, and the bugs are the ones nobody has hit yet. What you want is the most recent version that is also the slowest-moving and most stable.
That's the rule for enterprise computing generally — unless you specifically need something only the newer release has.
You now own a small piece of internet real estate. Next is working out how to get into it.