The problem is, it isn't easy at all. Running homeserver requires gigabytes of RAM and significant CPU performance to work at usable speeds. It just isn't feasible to run it on some dirt cheap VPS, you need beefy machine.
I'm also not even using Synapse workers at all, just a monolithic instance. Splitting the setup into workers would buy me an additional speedup if things got overly slow.
disclaimer: I tested it some time ago with Synapse. Now I see there is also new homeserver software, Dendrite. It is possible that it is order of magnitude less resource hungry, though I wouldn't count on that.
It's not the slimmest beast, in part because Synapse needs to scale up to country-scale deployments, but its ability to scale down has significantly improved over the past year.
That said, Dendrite and Conduit (https://gitlab.com/famedly/conduit/) are exciting projects which will optimize for different operational contexts.