1. VS Code is a very decent free IDE. It has tons of features that will get you going.
2. Hosting is a tricky question. There are tons of shared hosting services to get you on the right path and then if you get a game with tons of players you can scale up as needed with a VPS from digital ocean for cheap and you can always scale up from there if needed.
All other things sort of depend on you TBH. If you are going for PHP then you need to use PHP files, C# you would need to use CS files. So if you decide to use an engine, you would have to use that engineâs language files.
Like stated above, for level progress, cars, etc, it all depends on your engine. If you were to write your own (would not recommend at this time for a newb), you would have to figure that out based on your preference(s)
I also wanted to point out, you donât need hosting if you are just learning. You can develop locally using stuff like xampp or other alternatives but that is probably the easiest as a rookie to use