First, I am unable to host. My apartment wifi forbids it and I’m too poor to afford my own wifi.
Is there a good alternative to google docs? Preferably on the cloud, if not then that’s fine. I know LibreOffice writer exists but to my knowledge it lacks Doc’s document tab thing, which I make extensive use of, and cloud services. I’m trying to get off Google as much as I can, but the cloud hosted aspect of Docs is very useful, both for sharing links to documents quickly and for opening up a document on any of my 3 devices without having to sync or update the documents manually.
If you’re not doing it via your own domain, I don’t think it matters much. Half the people you email are on gmail anyways so you’ll never break free fully. So you can stay with Proton if you wanted to. I feel icky about them so I personally wouldn’t give them any money.
But there are also providers like Tuta that offer European hosted email services. I haven’t heard anything bad about Tuta.