A DigitalOcean vps can be a pretty inexpensive and easy option. I've done this with a Pi and Dyndns. It's pretty easy to setup but not as good (for me) as a DO

A DigitalOcean vps can be a pretty inexpensive and easy option. I've done this with a Pi and Dyndns. It's pretty easy to setup but not as good (for me) as a DO vps because my home ISP limits data heading out. I would have to purchase a business plan to fix that and it still wouldn't be better or cheaper than what DO and others can provide. A Pi can be used for development on your home network and it excels at that. And the older RPis can run [1]CouchDB and be configured to "Live Sync" with a CouchDB running on a commercial VPS. That too is a pretty easy to setup and it provides some pretty nice options. For example, you can make your app use the Cloud based CouchDB while you're out and about and it will sync your data with your local CouchDB. Then when you get home you can turn off the cloud access and even delete your data on the cloud DB. 1. The latest version of CoudhDB (v3.0+) doesn't run on the new ARM based Pi 4.