I recommend also trying Weechat running in screen/tmux on your server, connect to it over SSH.

Znc+mirc did work for me but things like scrollback and access from multiple devices are much nicer now with just my Weechat instance.

I used znc for a bit, but I'm trying to get weechat up and running (but, of course, using Emacs' ERC as my client) on a Rpi.

znc is apt install ... And a few edits in a config file.

Aren't there services that offer bouncer hosting, with some default config?