The key to avoid the burden is to restrict the scope of your services to what you actually need.

Let me elaborate.

I've been hosting my own email (plus something else) at home for the last five years or so. So far, so good: various services signup, job-related email exchanges, no problems.

I rarely touch my home server and I mostly do software upgrades. I run postfix, and when configuring virtual users on virtual domains, I invested an afternoon to actually go trough the documentation and came up with a reasonably simple configuration where all the data about users and domains is stored on simple text files: no SQL database to manage (not even SQLite).

Such a solution is easy to back up and easy to interact with.

For more adventurous testing, I just have another machine.