For another email provider alternative, I would suggest Forward Email. I still haven’t used them yet, but my goal is to switch to them from Proton when I get around to it.
I was thinking of playing around with email hosting, at least for offline backups, and I’ve been interested in using Stalwart.
I also suggest Porkbun for purchasing a domain.
I’m glad I was able to choose C++ for my data structures class. Using pointers made it much easier to wrap my mind around trees, graphs, etc. Towers of Hanoi was a mindfuck, though.