It’s just a suggestion. Many would probably find that the workload they host is available on containers. I run a Kubernetes cluster on bare metal at home. There’s also nothing stopping you from creating VMs that you can ssh to with KubeVirt

Depends on what you want to self host? Could be worth it to see if what you self host can be deployed as containers instead

Minikube and try to get everything on Kubernetes?

I’ve used https://controld.com/

Cloudflare is just so nice. Handles ssl for all your sites automatically.

Just use CF with host restrictions. You can easily add which hosts should have access of you want to limit access further

I’d say don’t self host mail. Just use protonmail or something. You probably don’t want to hear that but you’ll just end up with something less reliable, less features and you’ll have to spend sma lot of time on it