Services vary a lot on how they are deployed and their dependencies, etc. The knowledge I have (and honestly I don’t have much) I just built over time, tinkering with different set-ups and trying to debug problems when they arose. So I guess just choose a few difference services and try to get them working (choose low-stakes ones at first, where the risk of getting pwned or losing everything is very low). Docker can abstract away a lot, so maybe try more direct deployments if you are interested in learning.

• Lower upfront costs and quicker to set up as you don’t have to buy the hardware
• Don’t have hardware taking up space in your home
• Flexibility of being able to scale up or down your specs (or get rid of the VPS entirely) at the click of a button
• Don’t have to open your home network to the internet
• Better uptime (not your job to fix outages)