The three major cloud providers all have marketplaces where people can “spin up” VMs that others host images of - here is an example of mastodon on Azure from bitnami - https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/bitnami.mastodon?tab=Overview
The back going back an extra page feels like a bug that has to get fixed. I usually control+click links to open in a new tab (maybe not exactly what you want, but hopefully helps)