I have been using porkbun.com as a domain registrar.
For email hosting, self-hosting is a lot of effort. If you just want the damned thing to work. I've heard good things about Fastmail, and personally I'm using migadu.com. it's $19/year for micro.
Use any imap client, or if you want to keep using what you're using Gmail and Outlook and Apple mail apps w all support your new personal account over imap as well
What kind of limitation did you run into? Lack of packages or speed?
6GB is more than enough for many desktop environments. Plus, a server wouldn't have any anyway. not booting the Ubuntu installer seems like a bug, or other non-resource problem. if you try with a newer installer, or some other distro, that computer can host many things.
it seems antennapod recently got the play state sync feature using gpoddersync.
in addition to "dedicated Nas + compute node" and "just use a desktop" suggestions, there's the microserver option in between. Small, but has enough power to run stuff other than storage.
Hp proliant microserver is what I use, you can try getting a previous generation from second hand market.
Random idea, continuously ping the router from the laptop so it doesn't "forget" that the laptop exists on the WLAN?
(I know you mention the laptop can still reach out when you try, but maybe the trick is to keep having traffic to-from the laptop continuously)
Yeah, that's the key point. They weren't trawling all the servers, they probably had a wiretap order for one specific server. As a legal business, you can't just say no to police because you don't like mitm.