ShapeBlock is a PaaS similar to Heroku/Railway, but runs on your infrastructure. It is designed for independent developers, startups, and agencies, Shapeblock’s BYOI (Bring Your Own Infrastructure) model lets you deploy applications effortlessly on your favourite cloud provider.
> I'm not looking for massive pay, just something to occupy my time and some side money.
You have two options.
Start working on a side project which you find interesting. Apply any new technologies you'd wanted to learn. You can either profit from it, or worst case, you learned something new from that. I don't want to glorify failure, but the most important thing is to ship it.
The less risky option is to build your brand/credibility in a niche area, like offering a lot of value in form of blog posts, free e-books etc. This is more organic, takes time, but builds the trust which makes it easier to find clients.
Both options involve a combination of various skills other than pure technical competence like marketing and project management.
Like most comments here, I'd suggest you get started by deploying your side project to any of the cloud providers out there. This process alone will teach you a lot about deployment.
Also, I find https://serversforhackers.com/ and https://sysadmincasts.com/ very useful.
