I started my VPS journey back in 2016, with a RackNerd $1 VPS.

Vanilla Debian, but having much pain with multiple domain. It's possible but manually set the hosts/nginx file is not convenient.

After that, tried Kubernetes which OVERKILL-BS. Then Traefik + Docker, which was agame changer.

There are so many ways to deploy stuff online, especially for bootstrap/small project you can just rent 0.5 GB machine it is more than enough.

And you will have fun time to tweak the system, because you have full control over anything.