I have looked at Google Cloud Run, Microsoft Azure and Kamatera so far. These are free trials, and I deleted and removed all projects after playing with them.

I am working on a chatting application for my portfolio. I'm using MERN to create the app and I can run it locally and connect to the local server with any device on the network. Before I got into this I didn't realize setting up a cloud server was going to be so confusing, and that's after trying to watch tutorials on youtube and going through documentation.

On google, people have talked about VM Instances, (Bare Metal Solution?) Servers, networks, VPC's, VPC Networks, serverless VPC, etc. and I have explored all of these things and I just don't understand why it's so hard to get a node.js file running somewhere remote.

Microsoft Azure and Kamatera were pretty much the same experience.

I'm not the smartest or faster person, I've got cognitive issues, but if anyone can kind of give me some simple steps or explanations to get me started in the right direction, I'd really appreciate it.

I don't need a complete write-up or guide, just a push in the right direction for my specific project, which is just getting my node.js code somewhere so the client can connect to through it. I think?