Newbie question: first nodes local or remote?

I have some unused domains registered, so thought I’d like to use one with DNS defined
to match a node’s IP, but have not found an example like that. It seems I’ve jumped ahead of
the usual tutorial order of steps.

Should I create a vagrantup.com virtual machine to emulate a machine on my local network
to do the tutorials, and is this because that’s a good workflow? And I suppose it is going to be easy
to transfer a chef_client managed server instance to a hosted chef node after testing it?