First post from my new, self-hosted, personal instance. Feels good!
I host it on a VPS since I was hesitant about having something like this hosted at home. As far as spinning it up, it was relatively straightforward using the docker instructions (https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/install_docker.html).
I ran into some issues with the postfix container not being able to send emails, but it turned out I just needed to ask my VPS provider to unblock port 25 for SMTP.