test, experiment, no one is going to give you a magical working step-by-step tutorial on how to run a successful bot farm
you honestly need to just experiment.
in regards to 'protecting yourself'
proxies prevent chain bans by allowing you to bot under a different ip, you should bot no more than 2 accs on 1 ip or else you're very likely to receive a chain ban
ignore vpn, the only 2 you should be thinking about are vps (virtual private server) < basically an online desktop, and proxies.
hope this helped