It is insanely easy to setup and run your own server. I did it, and it's just myself and my friend that play. Heck, I even have mods.
I truly can not understand why anyone would pay for this. It took 30 mins using basic skills everyone should have to begin with. And by "basic skills" I mean the ability to follow step by step instructions with pictures.
what mods? are they easy to use? I just want one that lets me and other players all use creative mode to build big cool things, now that I'm finished with the game content till the next update
I think Valheim Quality of Life mod is what you're looking for. Installing mods is super easy. There are tons of walkthroughs on youtube. I also would recommend a map sharing mod like serversidemap as well.
You can run it on you main machine if it's powerful enough to handle the extra load. We played for a while with me just "sharing" my world. But eventually we wanted to have a dedicated server with mods. I tried it a few times running the server straight from my main pc, but it was a little laggy for me. So now I have the server running on an old laptop.
If you do run it on a stand alone machine, it doesn't have to be a crazy powerful one. It runs fine for us on an 8 year old laptop.