Consider building yourself a free Sandbox.
This gives you:
- A way to practice installing, restoring, and modifying Discourse.
- A non production environment to test changes on.
- If you run it with mail enabled you can get user feedback about new features.
If you use a different provider for your VPS, but the same OS, with the same updates, and your discourse installation has the same plugins, permissions, groups, settings (Except for site name, notification email), and update level, then if something stops working on your live site, but still works on your sandbox, then you’ve already narrowed down the list of possible causes by a large factor.