Personally, I chose to run my own. Setup was a headache, but then I had to do things the hard way. Server on a subdomain but advertising my root domain with an Element web client running on the root. At least that was how I was setup originally. System updates borked the web client and as no one ever used it, I couldn't be bothered to fix it. The Matrix server itself though has been running without a hickup for over 2 years. Just gone down for updates.
If you haven't seen this list yet, you might take a look at it and see if anything strikes your fancy.
https://joinmatrix.org/servers/
I will say that the Matrix.org homeserver is said to be rather slow as everyone seems to go there as default for some reason. Couldn't say why. /s
I tried to do that too using dendrite (because I'm low on resources), and eventually stopped because it lacks some features important for bridges.
I'd definitely do it again when dendrite is more "prod ready" ! Just for the sake of participating with a username under my own domain ;)
I use Synapse. I honestly didn't dig into the differences between the different servers too deeply. At the time Synapse was the more mature project so that was what I used.
It's running on a 2 core VPS with 4 GB ram and 80 GB storage. Checking on it now it looks like I'm using about 50% of both my storage and ram. Load look like it has stayed under 20% for the last month and has usually been under 5%
Are you looking for free servers or professional hosting? Communick (obvious disclosure, I run the service) provides Matrix access for quite cheap - $9/year gets you access to a communick.com account and a completely worry-free experience.
https://NormalCity.life is one I'm talking about to you from as we speak, but honestly visting to see if anything strikes you as worth subscribing to from your existing account is great. We're going to be expanding our community repertoire to feature more permutations of "tech and creativity," and I'm currently writing a multi-post series on the Fundamentals of Lemmy.