First step would be to sign up for Cloudflare and use that for DNS management.

If you're gonna make a website for it, just keep it simple and make a flat-file HTML/CSS site. You can host it for free on Netlify.

You can use Zoho for free mail hosting

Also, if you bought the domain from GoDaddy or one of their subsidiary companies, transfer it away to Cloudflare, Porkbun, or Namecheap.

Avoid buying any hosting from any EIG owned company.

I use mine for a VPS running Ubuntu. It let's me mess around with stuff and also let's me host things like discord bots without needing a local pc always running.

My VPS is pretty cheap, something like 10 bucks a month so it's worth it for me.

If you want to play with server stuff, OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) has some pretty generous "Always Free" stuff.

I'm running 2 servers and haven't even scratched the surface of what can be done for free.

If you want to self-host services, check out Yunohost. There you can install many different services like Vaultwarden as a password manager, Nextcloud for files, Blogging platforms, Mail services, ... You could use a Raspberry Pi as a server like i do. Otherwise, you could also use an old dekstop PC or some free VPS Best you can do with the domain is registering at cloudflare; there you have a lot of options to manage your domain.

Does anyone have other ideas?

Being this programming.dev, I feel compelled to suggest self-hosting a Lemmy instance.

The basics would be a simple personal webpage, which you can serve directly with a file server.

I like running syncthing as my personal alternative to Dropbox.

Some registrars like Namecheap offer services such as email rerouting, which gets you to use any custom email address in your domain through Gmail.

Don't pay attention to anyone mentioning CDNs or any nonsense of the sort. If your services aren't expected to serve a lot of traffic of have SLIs to meet, you do not need them. You only need a system with static IP address open to external traffic, and get your domain registrar to resolve a domain/subdomain to that IP address.

Just make sure everything you serve through that domain can be redeployed on a whim. A rarely discussed topic is how the internet is a wild jungle with dozens of vulnerability scanners running around the clock to find any unmaintained server they can exploit. Any server that's not managed by a professional team 24/7 fits that criteria.

Look at hosting your own sandstorm instance

It's basically a suite of open source tools.

I've self hosted at least one domain for decades.

Initially self hosted email, webserver, and whatever else I wanted. But now I've started paying for some of the hosting.

If you want a really reliable service and aren't an sysadmin already, pay someone.

If you want to learn and do it yourself, go for it.

I still mostly host myself on a VPS node (Web, Blog, ssh git access, and DNS master), but pay to have email hosted. Server is a VPS at Linode I've had for probably nearly two decades. Email is hosted on Google Workspace so it includes calendar, address book, storage, groups, Google Docs, etc.