Creating and hosting a website with a VPS from 1984.is on a Debian bullseye 11

Although this can work with other VPS providers, it requires some modification, but as of today this process can work as is.
Prerequisite:

Having setup Debian bullseye 11 with 1984.is
Having purchased a domain and set its DNS host records to your VPS

Start with updating and upgrading

# As of 2024-21-12 the "Allow-release.. and fix-missing" is needed
apt-get update --allow-releaseinfo-change && apt-get upgrade --fix-missing

We will be using SSH to work on our local machine

From the local machine, generate a gpg key to more securely ssh into the VPS server, then send the id to the server.

gpg --full-gen-key
ssh-copy-id <server_name>@<server_ip>

Then login into the server from your local machine;
Start with securing the login process through SSL and GPG:

ssh <server_name>@<server_ip>
# Edit the sshd service config to secure the server login process
nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

In the sshd service config, find the following lines and edit them like so:
PasswordAuthentication no
UsePAM no
ChallengeResponseAuthentication no

Now test if the GPG SSH configuration worked:

systemctl restart sshd
exit
ssh <server_name>@<server_ip>

Did authentication with GPG through SSH work or not?

Now test out if this worked by exiting the VPS server in your terminal and try to ssh into it again. If it doesn’t prompt you for a password, congratulations! :)
If it doesn’t let you in then something went wrong with the ssh process. Simply login to 1984.is, open their terminal and edit the service_config file back to “yes”’s so you can continue logging in with your chosen password

Now for updating, upgrading and installing packages:

apt-get update --allow-releaseinfo-change
apt-get upgrade
apt install curl nginx certbot python3-certbot-nginx

Setting up nginx

cp /etc/nginx/sites-available/default /etc/nginx/sites-available/mysite
nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/mysite

Edit the config of your site like so then save and exit:

From this	To this
listen 80 default_server;	listen 80;
listen [::]:80 default_server;	listen [::]:80 ;
root /var/www/html;	root /var/www/mysite;
server_name _;	server_name websiteName.xyz www.websiteName.xyz

Save and exit.

Make a symbolic link to the new nginx file:

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/mysite /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

Make a directory to store the Hugo website:

mkdir /var/www/mysite
cd /var/www/mysite

Make a dummy HTML to test out if you can see your website:

touch index.html && nano index.html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>

<h1>My First Heading</h1>
<p>My first paragraph.</p>

</body>
</html>

Save and exit

systemctl reload nginx

Lastly let’s obtain and install the SSL certificate

certbot --nginx
# Enter your email, agree to the terms, answer if you want emails, 
# select the domains you want to register

If you get an error, you may need to go into the nginx config again to remove ipv6only:

# Get the pid of open vpn then kill it
pidof openvpn
kill <pid>

# Check if it worked by reloading nginx and trying to open your website
# in a private window
systemctl reload nginx.service

Another error you might encounter is that OpenVPN is using the same port as Cerbot:

nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/mysite
# Remove 'ipv6only=on'

From this	To this
listen [::]:443 ssl ipv6only=on; # managed by Certbot	listen [::]:443 ssl ; # managed by Certbot

systemctl reload nginx

That’s it, now you should have an HTML website that you can start working on.

Thanks to Luke Smith for inspiring me with the guide he made: Link to invidious video