I use cloudflare, the free tier, that includes email associated to your domain. In essence it will route email messages to any domain/address you own to a destination. Say outlook.com or gmail.com free email tier.

Sounds nice. I use a similar setup, only my server is a mini PC with 12gbs of RAM and 1TB msata. Instead of VMs I use Linux containers with ubuntu as base. Then I run full-fat applications like Wazuh, checkmk and docker containers. I tend to use one LXC per function. I even host my personal blog in this setup. No piercied firewall here for public facing services. I’m using clouflare tunnels and access.