I had that same problem, then I saw some YouTube videos where the guy recommended using Ansible to do stuff and it’s been night and day, not only it’s reproducible so if I ever want to move a service to another machine all I have to do is move a couple of roles around and possibly copy stuff over to keep the data but also it acts as documentation, because if I ever forget something I can look at the code.

Also I decided to write the roles myself instead of relying on pre-existing ones, so there’s some logic to how my stuff gets deployed and it’s easy to extend for any new stuff I want to add.

Depends on what you want the server to do. A Minecraft server and a Pihole server have vastly different requirements. As a general rule, any old laptop or desktop will do, think on requirements for your grandma and that should cover most (except gaming servers) needs.