Well i believe he bought a bulletin then he put a load of ideas together got a few mods to help, hired a few programmers and ye ye ye. I believe he is also a compute science major so he knows quite a bit, so ye ask him.
You can just purchase web hosting at a bare minimum, so a VPS is not required. Try Name cheap or Web hosting pad. They are two good ones. Stay away from GoDaddy.
You can find guides for stuff like this on youtube.
I watched a guide the other day, and this guy had a whole web series on how to make one (it was more along the lines of coding the website and doing the gfx for it) but youtube is a good tool as well as google