It's hard to put into words, which is why I said "feels" rather than "is" ;) It might just be my own lack of skill, but I found myself initially getting overwh

It's hard to put into words, which is why I said "feels" rather than "is" ;) It might just be my own lack of skill, but I found myself initially getting overwhelmed at trying to hunt down which settings to change to ensure no federation or third party calls were made, since that was my usage scenario. Even then, a rogue "allow vector.im" snuck in here and there at first. My second go around a year or two later was much easier since I already knew what to look for, and had a better grasp of how to handle the ACME/DNS aspect of it all (which isn't the fault of the Matrix team at all, but was still a pain point). Some other pain points for me were grasping identity servers and trusted certificate providers and STUN/TURN and integrations, since there was a whole lot of learning necessary for me before I was comfortable just following the installation steps as-written. I did try the Ansible playbook during another attempt, and while it worked pretty well there was still the same sense of "wow that's a lot of configuration". I also foolishly tried to apply it to a pre-existing server running nginx, which, while possible, adds some extra complexity to avoid breaking existing configs. YMMV, I am just not the brightest of fellas. As far as resources go, a $5 VPS covered more than enough to handle even the older versions of Synapse for my use case, since I wasn't federating and have a fairly small number of users (under 100). I couldn't tell you whether federation or more usage would change that, but community reports (at the time) were that Synapse struggled. Much of that seems to have been addressed since then. Overall I think if I were to start over, I'd stick to the Ansible playbook on a fresh server.