[onefish]

I guess I'd be curious about how you deal with e-mail, since that was my negative experience with a cloud provider (Lavabit), and I think in-general e-mail is a much harder (and maybe inadvisable) service to self-host.

I always like to read experiences and opinions of people who lean one way or the other with regard to all this stuff, or are at least cognizant of it at all, since it seems 99% of people just use whatever they happen upon first and solves their problem.

[Arn_Thor]

Good question. I'm still stuck with Google for my personal mail, but I use an email client on my PC to download emails and archive them, and periodically do a full download of all my Google content. Not the easiest or most fun solution, but I found that hosting my own email would be a prohibitive amount of work.

[toothbrush]

I don't know if it's worth mentioning here, but i find one level of indirection enough. I have for the last n years paid for various email hosting providers (outsourcing the hassle of set-up, without going into the side discussion of how much hassle that is or not) but been able to switch effortlessly because i own my own domain. I've merely had to switch MX records when i wanted to switch, my emails are all still on my home computer (offlineimap, but i should really switch to whatever the kids these days are using) and my contacts were none the wiser.