I'd strongly recommend using a hosted k8s - either GKE, EKS, or I believe digital ocean have just released one.
If you want to use an existing VPS just to test it out, see the docs here https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/independent/create-cluster-...
Once you have the cluster running, kompose[1] might be a nice tool if you're used to using docker-compose, however I'd say just use it as a guideline - you'll probably want to rewrite most of what it generates at one point or another
On the other hand EKS offers what I'd call a "managed kubernetes master", everything else is still pretty manual.
My team has deployed in AWS using KOPS and EKS, Azure with AKS and ACS-engine, and GKE in GCP
GKE is far, far easier to manage, update, etc.
Swarm is much easier to reason about and run. It's a godsend for startups without dedicated devops.
I have dreamed a dream, but now that dream is gone from me.
The one downside is that it doesn't have a feature complete UI and there arn't any good ones out there that do what the Kubernetes webui does.