What’s the best place for a beginner to start if they want to learn to host their own Lucee server at a low cost U.S. based hosting provider? This is strictly for learning purposes. I assume I want a Linux environment.
If strictly for learning, can you clarify that you understand you need not using ANY hosting provider (nor pay anyone for anything)? You can install lucee (or acf) free locally, on your machine (Windows, Linux, Mac), whether for development or such “learning”.
And you can use the lucee install or zip extractions approaches, or use Ortus Commandbox, or use containers based on images from Lucee or Commandbox. There’s value in “learning” any of these–though I realize some may not want to bother with any of them for some reason.
Indeed, if you mean you want to install it somewhere OTHER than your local machine–for the purpose “learning” about such remote deployment, there are in fact MANY options (ranging from free to paid) for deploying Lucee (or CF.) They vary based on how much will be managed by the hosting provider vs being managed nearly entirely on your own.
So really, it may help if you can specify just a bit more about your goals: what you do or do not want to have to do/learn. Different people have different needs and interests, so what’s “best” will also vary. 
@carehart
I have successfully installed Lucee locally on a Mac with Tomcat.
I would be interested in learning how to manage a VM entirely on my own. Looking for some place to start that won’t be too intimidating for a Linux beginner. DigitalOcean makes Droplets sound easy? Are there other providers that are similar?
I won’t be making any money from this so I’d like to keep the cost down. Thanks for your help!
Thanks for clarifying, and again I said there are free options. For example, beyond DO, all the cloud providers offer a “free tier” of service which include you getting a low-resource VM, on which you can install Lucee ( or ACF–just adding that for the sake of completeness, for others reading along). Check out AWS, Azure, Google cloud, Oracle cloud, Alibaba and others for more details.
Back to your original question, I’m not aware of any resource to guide you in any of those from a Lucee perspective, but others here may chime in with such.
One more point: you can certainly spin up a VM on your Mac, if you just wanted to experience things in a “from scratch linux environment”. Options include Parallels, VMware, Virtualbox and more. Consider also the free Multipass tool from Ubuntu.
Or, again, containers are another way to get such a “scratch” Linux deployment environment (though different from vm’s, with pros and cons in contrast). Docker Desktop for Mac is a great way to get started with that, but I realize it may be an avenue you have no reason to want to explore.
I use Ubuntu on a Digital Ocean droplet. Pretty straightforward and inexpensive to fire up a server with enough resources to run MySQL or Mongo, with Apache2 and Lucee. Free SSL certs with LetsEncrypt. Register a $5 domain and point it at the server with UFW and Fail2Ban to keep the idiots out. Cheap as chips in real terms.
Are the Basic or General purpose tiers enough to run Lucee at Digital Ocean?
Andy, while you await David’s reply, did you have any luck with the options I proposed a week ago?
I run MySQL, Apache2 & Lucee on a 2 vCPUs/4GB /80GB Disk at 24USD a month. But that is a really busy server as it hosts full prod of a webapp. Obvs I have DR in place, so double that and include Snapshooter and UpTimeRobot etc. but not a consideration for your experimenting. I would say that 2GB is the minimum that I have successfully run a full instance with no problems (and that ran and ran) - not sure of the cost, but probs half that. Remember that you can just add more resources in a couple of mins, if you ever needed to. For bigger systems I use the same spec with a dedicated MySQL box with load balancing on the app servers.