My Mastodon server is hosted through Mastohost and so the rigors of installing and upgrading are taken care of by someone else. Really good service, and guy behind it.
Friedica is running on a Linode VM I’m renting. (Very affordable. It is $5 a month) Cool thing about the Linode thing, it they’ll let me download the whole VM, if I decide I want to host it on my own hardware.
I could run both of these on my house, but with only one internet connection I only have so many ports, etc. I am hosting quite a lot of other things on my home hardware.
However to answer your question, Mastodon can be a bit of a pain to set up, and update. If you are not comfortable doing sysadmin like work, then going the Mastohost route is what I would recommend.