I've been using my own kimsufi server for years, and live in Montréal so the latency to their Canadian location is superb. The low end servers are often sold out, but become available every couple months. I went for one with a spinning disk for the extra storage. The server's dedicated so performance is much better than a storage VPS where people share a spinning drive.

However I still end up forwarding everything to to my gmail account and using it as en e-mail client because it makes e-mailing searching and filtering so fast and easy. Outgoing mail sent through my own SMTP server and typically gets through, so I could set up dovecot later.