I used to want to manage everything about the application, the entire stack, myself. This was recently enough that, in the last big application I worked on, I set up everything in docker containers and tried to keep track of all the configuration files and settings. Admittedly, docker (which I had recently started dabbling with when I started on that application) makes deploying stacks superficially easy.
But there's so much that goes into only the web server (load balancing, caching, host configuration, routing, etc) that it's next to impossible to keep everything in check and, more importantly, safe and updated unless one focuses almost entirely on maintenance.
So, IMO, the "don'ts" of managing one's own web server is doing it at all unless one wants to dedicate a huge amount of time to it.
I no longer want to do that and I'd rather just code so I'd say the "dos", for a novice developer, is letting people who are already working on that to keep working on that. The easiest way to do this is using whatever cloud is more suitable; all of the bigger ones offer free tiers and/or trial runs one can use to experiment and prototype.