I’m hosting one right now and it’s expensive ($48/month at Digital Ocean) to have good performance and render distance even with every performance enhancing mod I could find to throw at it without trying some experimental ones. Specifically, this was using the standard Java server JAR instead of either of the performance optimized server distributions because they weren’t on 1.21 yet. The administration itself is pretty easy fwiw, but it’s a RAM hog. Anything less than 4 GiB and it would eventually get reaped by the OS to avoid crashing the whole machine. I went up to 8 GiB even though 6 would likely suffice. Free hosting services tend to reduce render distance down painfully low, but may work. It’ll still be laggy as shit when people cause new chunks to be loaded in.