I can see that the cloud hosting would be a sticking point if you aren’t familiar with it. Luckily, for Protohackers you can use a really basic setup. I used H

I can see that the cloud hosting would be a sticking point if you aren’t familiar with it. Luckily, for Protohackers you can use a really basic setup. I used Hetzner’s standard Ubuntu image, opened the nano text editor on the server, copy-pasted my Python code, then ran the program using the OS’s version of Python. Didn’t even run it in the background; just started the program and closed it when Protohackers reported the tests were done.