One great thing about setting up your own server is to do it faster each time. Deployment, hardening, running services.
Get used to your terminal, use SSH, understand how firewalls work and run a couple of services such as nginx, fail2ban etc.
Once you have a hand of it try to do it using Ansible. It will be a valuable skill if you decide to provision, for example, a swarm of servers for a cluster. And it will give you reproducibility and a trail of steps that you will ensure get executed for each server you deploy.
Get used to your terminal, use SSH, understand how firewalls work and run a couple of services such as nginx, fail2ban etc.
Once you have a hand of it try to do it using Ansible. It will be a valuable skill if you decide to provision, for example, a swarm of servers for a cluster. And it will give you reproducibility and a trail of steps that you will ensure get executed for each server you deploy.