So I am new to making web apps and I was trying to make a website with express in backend. I didn't want to spend any money to host it so i tried vercel and after countless errors and asking for help in various server, it turns out u can't host your own api endpoints on your vercel app. So I took some advice from other people and they told me to keep the API on a different server. I remembered that my friend and I share a VPS so I hosted my API on it (Without any domain so i was making requests using the VPS' ip). It worked like a charm on my local machine but I guess vercel doesn't allow outgoing requests to urls without https (SSL certificates) and since my VPS doesnt have a certificate vercel kept requests to it.
I asked for help about this and someone told me to try cloudflare and they also mentioned pages and functions. I've never used cloudflare before so I have no idea what to do. Please help