DreamHost and craft cms

Hey folks,

I need some help dealing with DreamHost and installing Craft CMS (on DreamHost). I have a VPS (virtual private server) on DreamHost. I was told that I could have nginx, craft working on the VPS. But now I'm told that I do not have access to 'sudo', I can't configure default.conf. The DreamHost doc's suggest that I can create a conf by creating the file in domainName/nginx. The first problem is I don't know what is suppose to go into the conf file, a second problem what would be the name of the conf file.

Normally, the default.conf has very little in it and I setup a sitename.vhost that contains:

server {
listen 80;
# listen [::]:80 default_server;
listen 443 ssl http2;
# listen [::]:443 ssl http2;

# vhost specific logs.
access_log sitename/logs/craftcms.access.log;
error_log sitename/logs/craftcms.error.log error;

# Webroot directory
root sitename/public;
index index.html index.php;
server_name sitename


# SSL Configureations
include /etc/nginx/conf/ssl-craftcms-selfsigned.conf;

# Secure Configurations
include /etc/nginx/conf/secure-craftcms.conf;


# PHP Configurations
include /etc/nginx/conf/php-fpm.conf;
}

Since I don't even know where the php files are located and where php-fpm files are I'm at a lost.
I need some help and I'm hoping that someone understands the DreamHost setup.
Thanks for any help,
Johnf