New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: How to setup own server hosting a service with API (and no front end)?

Ask HN: How to setup own server hosting a service with API (and no front end)?
9 by rsp1984 | 14 comments on Hacker News.
Hello HN, I'd like to use my own server to host a new service, accessible through an API, for an application (Win/Android/iOS) that I wrote and that already has users. No web frontend is necessary. Just the service that my app calls through an API. So far I have relied on Google Cloud (App Engine, Cloud functions, etc..) to run these kinds of things but for the new service I find that Google Cloud is too limited. It also requires Mac computers with M1, running Monterey. My question is: how do I get started setting up my own server(s)? I found numerous tutorials for setting up web servers but I don't need a website / frontend. Just the service with an API. I would also like to have some amount of scalability and protection against DDoS and similar attacks. Is this possible?