LXC refers to the technology that enables programs to work in containers like Docker. I haven't tried it, but there are dockerized versions of NodeBB that are supposed to be easy to deploy. Because it's still kind of a new technology for deployment YMMV.
Traditionally NodeBB is deployed as a process running on a VPS (which is commonly a VM dedicated to you (aka KVM)) since it already has all the daemonization logic built in. So, this is the best tested and most common method of deployment. You can get a VPS from providers like Digital Ocean, AWS, Azure, etc.
Even if you don't have access to educator resources, there are typically ways to get free server time
