Just today I paid for a domain name in name.com. As part of the package, they sold me a hosted & managed WordPress installation for $60 USD a year. I was positively impressed (last time I setup a WP server I paid $5 a month for DigitalOcean, which makes it $60 for something I have to manage).
Companies like name.com, godaddy and whatnot should offer that kind of option. Or even AWS should have a "managed mastodon" server maybe. At the end of the day, most companies nowadays have their infrastructure in one of the 4-6 main cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCS, Oracle, ...).
Now if only there was a popular registrar with a streamlined interface that wasn't constantly trying to up sell you.
Personally I would prefer to see registrars limit themselves to providing domain names. But for that to work seamlessly they all need to support an open DNS protocol that makes it easy for users to delegate subdomains to 3rd-party apps and services. Something like DomainConnect[0] but with better support for selfhosting[1].
But what about step 0: have a working Linux installation with root privileges, and understand all the security implications of operating said installation.
Otherwise , mastodon hosters will become sneaky corporate spies, ad injectors and data resellers