I spent days trying to go from 0-100 figuring out the technical stuff and was making myself very stressed out and upset. I decided to just go to Yunohost and it just made things dead simple and in retrospect, enjoyable.
When I’m ready to learn I’ll spin up a new server and try to implement the same services the “hard” way, but for now I’ll continue to enjoy all the benefits of self hosted with a dead simple solution for implementing it. Don’t let e-peens get you down.