If you’re technically skilled with lots of prior knowledge about maintaining servers, you may want to set up your own online services using the manual installation instructions in the services’ official documentation. These assume a lot of prior knowledge, and are generally only suitable for people with a lot of tech skills. If you are a very techy person then you probably don’t need my help in setting up services manually!
Although manual installation involves the most work, it also gives the greatest possible range of software you can install and most options for customisation and tweaking. Not every piece of server software is available through managed hosting or self-hosting OSes, but all server software can be manually installed.
You can usually find the documentation for software on its website and/or on its code forge page. If the documentation is incomplete, there may be contact details for the developers who can answer questions.
Where can I find a list of self-hosted services that I can install manually?
One of the most popular lists of free open source services you can set up yourself is the Awesome-Selfhosted website ⧉.