For small projects I'd remove the bit about 'saving money' being a reason to use VPS. If you want to get better at Linux, then by all means. However, if you'd like to save money, assuming you place any value on your own time, it's just not worth it.
If your project fits in a "serverless" environment use Vercel or Netlify for free. If not, use the Fly free tier or pay a small amount of money per month. Use Supabase or Planescale for the db.
For the price of $0-5/mo* you can deploy whatever you like, without managing the infrastructure. Then you can focus on building whatever it is you wanted to deploy.
* The asterisk is of course that these services usually cost quite a bit more if your usage goes beyond the free tier, but you can always move to a VPS at that point.
Serverless has too much vendor lock-in and is hard to reproduce locally for development.
A VPS takes some time to set up but over time can offset a lot of cost - keep in mind hosting is an ongoing expense, and handholding services can cost over 2x more (I would even say easily 10x more).
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For small projects I'd remove the bit about 'saving money' being a reason to use VPS. If you want to get better at Linux, then by all means. However, if you'd like to save money, assuming you place any value on your own time, it's just not worth it.
If your project fits in a "serverless" environment use Vercel or Netlify for free. If not, use the Fly free tier or pay a small amount of money per month. Use Supabase or Planescale for the db.
For the price of $0-5/mo* you can deploy whatever you like, without managing the infrastructure. Then you can focus on building whatever it is you wanted to deploy.
* The asterisk is of course that these services usually cost quite a bit more if your usage goes beyond the free tier, but you can always move to a VPS at that point.
Serverless has too much vendor lock-in and is hard to reproduce locally for development.
A VPS takes some time to set up but over time can offset a lot of cost - keep in mind hosting is an ongoing expense, and handholding services can cost over 2x more (I would even say easily 10x more).
Then why not start there?
Shared hosting is also a great option for small projects.
It can be very cheap and if you stick to static HTML or PHP, deployment is as simple as a SCP or FTP upload.
Plus you don't need to worry about configuring a VPS or keeping up with security updates.
What is shared hosting exactly? Cheaper VPS services are already shared, with the server being a virtual machine on shared hardware.