This is a generic minecraft server setup guide that has been tested on Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04. By the end of this guide, you will have your very own multiplayer minecraft server that you and your friends (or anyone for that matter) can join and have fun on!
To begin, you will need to provision a VPS from cloud providers such as digitalocean or upcloud. Other popular services like AWS and google cloud would work as well with their EC2 and compute instances but the nature of those services are such that they are slightly more complicated to work with so they will not be included in this guide.
Once you have your VPS provisioned, SSH into your server with the following command (replacing 11.11.11.11 with your server's IP address):