Shameless request for advice - what's the simplest way of deploying stuff to a VPS?

I want to somehow set up an identical environment on my dev machine, and on a VPS in another continent (too much latency to edit files on directly). Ideally I'd then be able to deploy from a dev environment identical to my production environment. I tried docker but debugging the containers did my head in. I was thinking of trying VM images with vagrant, but I'd love to know if there is a simpler solution to this.

I'm just one person doing it in their spare time.