Dear Mike,
Absolutely we will help you. Lots of people here love sharing their experiences and war stories (myself included). First, I'd say you should be targeting DSpace 6.3 or the as-of-yet unreleased DSpace 6.4. The DSpace documentation has a list of required software that is a bit busy, but helpful nonetheless:
At this point I'd recommend deploying DSpace 6.x on Linux with OpenJDK Java 8, Tomcat 8.5, and PostgreSQL 10. You should be pretty familiar with Linux command line administration stuff. Otherwise, you could look to a hosted DSpace provider (there's a list somewhere on the wiki).
Regards,