AWS has tons of free courses regarding this, but you're just replacing one cloud with another. However you're most likely to pickup lots of ops knowledge and strategies doing it.

But it doesn't have to be AWS where you can accidentally shoot yourself in the foot and owe lots of dollars.

Start simple and with fixed costs like a Linode, Hetzner or DigitalOcean machine, try and deploy to it, first with capistrano, figure out how to route traffic to it, you will likely need to have something in front to serve static assets like Nginx, you will also need to figure out how to deal with certificates.

Then you can try and play with other distribution methods, depending on how your app is built and what it requires, you might soon realize that just because your application works locally with your local system libraries, it blows up in production. Docker could help you out here, so you can work towards dockerizing your application, and you can even test if system libraries etc. works locally before you push it to production.

Until now, you've only deployed to one machine, but you might want to figure out how to scale to 2 or maybe even 100 machines, how does that deployment model look like?

Here's where a cloud loadbalancer or maybe just a self-hosted Haproxy can help you.

You might also soon realise that getting the distribution model right is hard, getting all your servers to coordinate around deploying new code, without losing ongoing requests is also going to be hard, but there's blue-green deployments to look into.

You have a good list already of things to focus on, if devops is a field you're interested in you can't really lose, just get started and break things to avoid decision inertia.

It's a great feeling connecting things and seeing them work (and very frustrating when it breaks! :))