Ever wanted your own server that you can do whatever you want with it? Too lazy or got parents too nosey to let a computer run 24/7 in your own house? That’s excatly where Virtual Private Servers (VPS) comes in! A VPS is a virtualized server that is hosted by somebody else over the internet. You can setup anything you want on there and host some websites, or an email server, or a Minecraft server, or maybe all three at the same time on a single VPS!
There are various services that offer this, like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Hosting, Microsoft Azure, and other various small hosting companies. I would suggest Digital Ocean, because the interface is simple for beginners, and if you got a student email, you get a $50 credit on Digital Ocean to spend it on a VPS, which starts at the minimum of $5 a month, so that’s actually quite a bit of free money for once (The minimum is actually worth using too btw). I’m going to put thewebzone.net on there as soon as I get the real basics of thewebzone.net up and running.
Interacting with the server is vastly different from interacting with your desktop, because to save on resources most servers don’t use a graphical user interface, so when setting up and configuring a server, you will have to use the terminal to interact with it. Luckily I actually know how to use a terminal so that isn’t really a big problem for me.