> Traditionally, operating a Matrix homeserver has meant accepting a heavy operational burden. You aren't just installing software; you are becoming a system administrator. You have to provision virtual private servers (VPS), tune PostgreSQL for heavy write loads, manage Redis for caching, configure reverse proxies, and handle rotation for TLS certificates. It’s a stateful, heavy beast that demands to be fed time and money, whether you are sending one message a day or one million.

I have limited experience with Matrix, but you don't actually need Synapse (reference homeserver) which is quite a resource hog and not even remotely easy to setup/administer.

You can just use the lightweight Continuwuity homeserver for the Matrix part, and Caddy for the reverse proxy/TLS/ACME part, installed on a VPS. Both require minimal configuration, and provide packages for many Linux distributions, as well as Docker images.

(Continuwuity is a fork of conduwuit which was a fork of Conduit. Conduit was abandoned, but is now active again, and there are also other active forks as well. However, it seems to me that Continuwuity is currently the most active fork.)