Thank you all for taking the time to answer my questions. I've been out of the programming world for a long time, so I am back to being a newbie. I was told this is the place for newcomers to ask questions. I apologize if my questions did not contain the necessary sophistication or nuance for some to answer.
George, your answer makes the most sense. Thank you! You said:
>>Most cloud servers come preconfigured with some variation of eitherthe "LAMP" or "LAPP" stack: i.e. Linux, Apache, MySQL or Postgresql,PHP or Python.>>There needs to be a compelling *application* reason to installsomething else: a JVM (or Apache-Tomcat vs regular Apache),Ruby/Rails, Groovy/Grails, etc.