I share your pain. I bought the iHost as an alternative to HA, because if I want to use HA, there is a lot of alternatives much better by the same price (NanoPi, GK3V Pro, and others).
For me, the most annoying think in iHost is the lack of compatibility with zigbee devices. If them simply put the zigbee2mqtt to work would solve all problems.
With iHost, I am doing all the automations using Node Red. It works fine, but there is some limitations yet. I suggest you to use it for more complex automations.
For DIY, I am using ESPHome. I did a tutorial teaching how to integrate and use it with NodeRed: