Yup, I have gone through this. If you aren't confident with your skills you can look up to softwares like VestaCP [1] to setup everything for you. You can also use more advanced solutions like FreedomBox [2].

The pain is worth it!

Another fun tip: Enable catch all for your emails and then provide different email for each purposes, like this website can have email [email protected] and so on. I love to regularly see which website fucked up handling my email id and I just silently block that email in a click (and hence, much less spams).

[1] https://vestacp.com

[2] https://freedomboxfoundation.org