Yeah, I’ve got a UK Foundation licence but have never actually made a call - it was more of a “have transceiver might as well be legal to use it” thing.

(Also, HF antennas - just didn’t anticipate how difficult they were to set up properly)

Speaking of Linux, OpenBSD’s hypervisor (vmm) supports it so I managed to get docker and containers running on my server via Alpine Linux. Opens the door on all the latest ‘modern server stuff’ running happily on an OBSD box.

Yep. There’s a safe engineer on YouTube who was explaining the history of dial combination locks commonly used for government filing cabinets, etc. He pointed out that you can drill them in minutes but you’d need several hours to make good the damage such that the break in wouldn’t be easily detected. The combined time is therefore the ‘strength’ of the security. (Also, why it might be a good idea to have open sensors on safes, cabinets, etc)

Cloudflare aren’t a bad registrar (imo) - they sell and renew domains at wholesale cost, forward emails, can do website landing pages with a Worker (etc). Understand the product in depth and would seem like a reasonably safe bet. (Not shilling for them, just personal experience).

You can roll your own email if you can get your head around setting up an OpenBSD box and configuring OpenSMTPD and the correct domain DNS records - but the issue will be email deliverability. Gmail etc are going to treat as spam most emails that turn up from a residential or VPS linked IP address.

Personal email servers will communicate with each other happily but you need a middleman one for important recipients if you want to be sure it gets into an inbox.