So far, the audio encoder stack has been deployed on a local machine. However, in order to use an official TLS certificate with Let's Encrypt, a server with a public DNS entry is needed. Unless you have your own domain name already available on a server somewhere, it is not possible to use an official TLS certificate.

An easy way to get a machine with an associated DNS name is to rent a virtual machine from a cloud provider. These machines always have an associated DNS entry. It is often a purely technical name, composed of a key used as a subdomain of the provider hosting the service name, for example:

• On the Amazon Web Services EC2 service, it looks like the following: ec2-12-345-678-789.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com
• On OVH, it looks like the following: vps123456.ovh.net

Pure cloud providers usually rent virtual machines per hour. This is nice for doing some short tests, but can rapidly become costly. Whenever a long hosting is needed, it is often more cost-effective to rent a virtual machine on a monthly or yearly basis. This can save a lot of money; a typical ratio is that cloud hosting per hour is five times more expensive than per month, and cloud hosting per month is almost 10 times more expensive than renting a VM per year!

The following section has been tested on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) from OVH. They are one of the most cost-efficient hosting solutions for small systems. This machine has been configured with a Debian distribution, Docker installed on it, and remote SSH access. Details on these steps are not provided here since it is beyond the scope of this book.