Host a website on your VPS with Nginx and free SSL

Prerequisites

• A domain whose A record points to your VPS IP — see Point your domain at your server.
• Ports 80 and 443 open (firewall guide).

Install Nginx

apt install nginx -y

Create a site

Put files in /var/www/example.com and create /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name example.com www.example.com;
    root /var/www/example.com;
    index index.html;
}

Enable and reload:

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
nginx -t && systemctl reload nginx

Free HTTPS

apt install certbot python3-certbot-nginx -y
certbot --nginx -d example.com -d www.example.com

Certbot installs the certificate and renews it automatically. Test renewal with certbot renew --dry-run.

Reverse proxy to an app

Replace root/index with location / { proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3000; } to serve a Node.js or Python app.