You're confusing a VPN with a VPS. A VPS is a virtual private server, which is virtual server you can use to host web apps, etc. A VPN is a virtual private netw

You're confusing a VPN with a VPS. A VPS is a virtual private server, which is virtual server you can use to host web apps, etc. A VPN is a virtual private network, which is like an encrypted layer over your internet connection, so you can communicate securely with a corporate network, or masquerade your real IP address which is useful, for example, if you're trying to use a US-only service such as Pandora from outside the US. You might want to shy away from setting up and configuring your own VPS right now. When you've got your feet wet and have some experience, then look again at this as an option. For now, maybe you'll want to focus on a PaaS, but this might blow your budget. You're almost asking for the impossible: cheap, scalable, and simple. I also assume that your app probably is also going to chew through CPU cycles and memory due to its nature; I could be wrong on this point though. (On a side note, how have you built your app? Is this a Python/Ruby/PHP app, or something running on the JVM? Is the part of your app that does the heavy lifting written in a statically compiled language? What kind of database, if any, does it need? How memory hungry and CPU-heavy is your app? All these things will have an impact on your options.) There's going to be a ton of great advice in this thread. In addition to it all, I would recommend you do two things: 1. Learn. Learn how to set up and manage Linux servers. While there are recipe-style guides for setting up *nix servers, they're not always correct and they don't really impart any real knowledge. Read them to get started setting up a practice system, but bear their limited utility. Read (official) documentation and get as familiar as possible. Practice, try to break things, and fix them. This is how you get good. 2. In the interim, find someone (competent) to work with that can help you from a technical standpoint. This may break your budget unless they become a "cofounder" or something. If you're wanting to host domains, I suspect you're probably not going to want to be setting these up manually, so you're going to have to write a script that will do it for you, and configure the servers, etc.