Took only 5-6 hours, 2-3 hours you are only waiting. Monitoring seems important, did choose site24x7 (was a quick random search, first looked at stackware from google cloud, but it was to cumbersome), site24x7 setup is pretty straightforward, imo.
@someguy123 wrote a good setup guide: https://steemit.com/steem/@someguy123/your-guide-to-setting-up-a-witness-server-steem-in-a-box-hf19
Only the last part is a bit confusing, you are getting different private keys (one from your account and another from you server) and you need to copy paste the wight keys in the right places.
A password manager is highly recommended...
Ah cool, I will look into this soon as well. Thanks for the feedback!