How to pick a right hardware configuration setup(server) for MERN stack
Since this is for your learning, it shouldn't tax your hardware incredibly. If you are hosting I would with a free student account if you can. But if you have a linux laptop all of this should work well on it. You're not writing apps that are getting 10,000's of connections and transforming complex data. If you had an enterprise app I would indeed split off the DB from the frontend etc.