by OldCoder » Tue Dec 29, 2015 08:27
David, you can rent cloud servers of different types for $5 to $70 USD per month. A server suitable for a light-traffic MT world can be obtained for as little as $10 to $30 USD per month, but you may need to shop around.
If you have a U.S. credit card, you can get a basic cloud server for free. or close to free. from Amazon. This will be one of the AWS EC2 Micro Tier systems. It will not be powerful enough for a serious world, but it may be useful for learning and for experiments.
Warning: The free AWS EC2 is only free for one year, then they'll start to bill you. And don't sign up for any Amazon service, including the free AWS EC2, unless you're prepared to check bills every month to make sure that they're not overcharging you.
I recommend a cloud server with at least 1GB of RAM, 2 cores, 25GB of disk, and a Debian OS such as Debian, Ubuntu, or Mint. If you can afford more hardware, 4GB of RAM, 4 cores, and 50GB of disk is better.
CentOS is an option, but it is not recommended. If at all possible, get a Debian OS instead.
Once you have a cloud server, you'll need to go to the appropriate control panel and open some ports. At a minimum, configure things so as to pass these four ports through: 22 (ssh and scp), 80 (http), 443 (https), and 30000 (Minetest).
After the server is up and running, and ports are configured, you can start to install software. For Debian OSes, Minetest is pretty easy to set up, and you can host your own MT websites as well.
If you like, you can also rent a domain name such as "davidthecreator.com". The domain name is a separate service. I recommend that you go to Namecheap for this. It costs about $1.50 USD per month. This includes a privacy service named "WhoisGuard" that you should probably get.
If you obtain a cloud server, let us know and we'll try to comment further.