[mnutt]

For pretty much every language these days, there is a hosted service that will handle deployment for you, and you can just push code to them and they'll take care of the rest. Better yet, they're perfect for beginners, who usually don't know much about database tuning, firewalls, etc.

[drivingmenuts]

Which kind of leaves me not understanding how it's deployed, etc., which I kind of feel like I need to know.

There isn't any one perfect solution, just workable ones.

[mnutt]

Yeah, but the average person doesn't really understand how their PHP is set up either. It was done for them, or they copy and pasted some instructions.

Perhaps it's best if you either completely take deployment into your own hands, or you let someone else do it for you. Given all that, rolling your own could still be made simpler.