the bit that stops most home servers working: friends outside your house can't get in until you forward port 25565 on your router to the pc running it. some isps put you behind cgnat, and then port forwarding does nothing at all. if that's you, a tunnel service or a cheap host is less pain than fighting it. and keep the server on the same version everyone's game is on, a mismatch just refuses the connection.
depends who it's for. if it's just you and a couple of mates, Realms or one of the free hosts is far less hassle than doing it yourself.
if you want to host it at home on java: download the server jar from the official minecraft site, put it in its own folder, run it once (it'll stop straight away), open eula.txt and change false to true, then run it again. something like java -Xmx2G -jar server.jar nogui in a .bat file. people on your wifi can join with your local IP.
friends outside your house is where it gets annoying, you need to port forward 25565 on your router, and your public IP can change. that's the bit most people give up on.
bedrock has its own separate server download, the java one won't work for console players.
