A VPS is just a server machine (Ubuntu, CentOS,...) on the Internet which you can SSH into.
A local VPS is a VPS but running on your local machine thanks to Virtual Machine technology. It's very simple to create a VM thanks to Vagrant, so that you can use it to play with SSH, test deployment, test Ansible playbook,...
- Install VirtualBox
- Install Vagrant
- Create a virtual machine, for example: Ubuntu 20.04