Having done it before my honest advice to anyone planning this is:

1. Start with a Mastodon account on a regular server.
2. Build lists of friends etc.
3. After a few months, once you've curated a feed you like, move to a self hosted one.

That's if you intend to use it "socially" as opposed to, say, "commercially" (ie an cartoonist publicizing their work, for example, or even the corporate Mastoverse account for a burger chain), in which case it makes sense to have that account on a private server (where it's essentially self verifying, and can't be killed by a single confused overworked instance admin - in the case of the burger chain, also by an instance admin that would rather not host commercial accounts), but also a private account on one of the main servers for just being yourself.