Programming

If you're comfortable working on a local VM then perhaps a VPS such as Linode or Digital Ocean would be a good place to start; they're essentially VMs hosted in cloud you have total control of so you can install whatever you want just like a local VM. Even the cheapest VPS option is plenty for this sort of testing.

These have free trials too such as: https://www.linode.com/tux

It’s not that it’s hard to get node code running on a remote server per se, it’s that there’s a lot of decisions to make and finicky details related to the “non-functional” parts of serving an app over the internet: getting traffic to the app, configuring multiple copies of the app, storing state, the developer experience of shipping your app from laptop to production, secrets management, etc. By and large, the differentiator of most cloud providers and “platforms as a service” is in how they approach handling those details, and there’s usually a spectrum of configurability and convenience. In general, as you add options to configure, you get less convenient, but more easily able to address more use cases.

In general, I recommend new developers target the thing that’s most convenient, which usually means the thing with the fewest configuration options. For node apps, my go to recommendations right now are Glitch and Railway. I’ve also heard good things about Render, and Fly, but I haven’t used either personally, so can’t speak to either. Generally though, I think you’ll have an easier time looking for a platform as a service instead of targeting a cloud provider directly.

When I was learning I used Heroku free tier to host sites/servers. I was also using the MERN stack and used a Heroku CLI tool to do deployments.

Here's a step by step guide on freecodecamp.org for how to deploy an app to heroku. Hope it's helpful!

Look at “ngrok”. It’s one command, and gives you a publicly accessible address+port that forwards to your locally running service. The code is still running on your machine, but all the networking problems are handled for you.

If you want to leave it running all the time, google cloud and oracle cloud both offer free, albeit small, virtual machines. You can use ngrok there too.

From there, any cloud provider should be able to attach a public ip address to your virtual machine. Azure and Aws are the easiest here.

I recommend a virtual machine because it will be very similar to how you run your code right now. I would not use anything “serverless”, like azure functions, because there is a lot going on under the hood that you should understand first, so that you can solve problems easily.

That being said, google cloud run can be straightforward, but only if you stay “on the sidewalk” if you know what I mean.