[Shaun8]

Hmm, this actually got me thinking about my first experience with using SSH and connecting to a VPS. Kinda embarrassing how little I knew about servers and hardware at that time. Granted, I still have to learn much more in depth about it but at least now I can say that I know my way around utilizing and managing game servers.
The specs of that VPS were 2 GB ram and 10 GB SSD which were enough for my needs. It was actually owned by my friend, and he gave me access to it for setting up a game server. Things like port forwarding, root permissions and wrong architecture were my biggest obstacles at that time. This wasn't really "my" VPS but it was my first time using a server.
The first free VPS that I got was from AWS student program. It took a while to set up the starter account with which I could access the AWS management console. Side note: AWS is really weird with their student program. It's managed by a third party company Vocareum that creates your IAM account for you to use. They deny you to access support requests and many other parts of the console. On topic, it was a good learning experience. I understood many aspects of commercial servers and monitoring your usage, etc. I wouldn't recommend others to get AWS student account due to issues with the console and their credits system.
Anyway, that's just my opinion. Have a nice day.