Use the ansible Lemmy install, it's very simple and will also create https certs and everything. But you need a domain first, pointed at your hosted server ip address.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible

So basically:

• Buy domain
• Rent a server somewhere (hetzner is great and cheap).
• Point domain at server ip.
• Use the ansible install against your server to install everything.

That's pretty much it. The ansible install takes care of everything.

Then you need to subscribe to some other instance community from your instance so other instances know you exist, for federation to work.

There are multiple.