Thank you so much for these instructions, I'm not completely done installing the node software yet, but if it works well I may redo all my nodes like this.

I am trying a VPS host called vpsfast.net since they offer VPS in lots of different countries. A few notes about the install:

• Make sure that the virtual disk and network drivers (virtio in my case) are enabled in your provider's control panel before the install, I found out too late that the default ide disk driver was set and had to reinstall after selecting vertio.

• My VPS came with an Ubuntu install since that is what I chose when I ordered it, consequently there were already partitions setup that the installer would not let me delete. I used a menu option in the installer to open a shell and used fdisk to manually remove the partitions to get back to a blank disk.

• I had trouble installing npm, not sure why but I found these instructions which worked:
  https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-nodejs-on-debian-9-stretch-linux