What you've described in the last bit is my current setup. I run a pruned Bitcoin Core node when I care to see the UTXO set. I am completely happy as is but a part of me feels like a hack using things like gmail.
It's the best, simplest setup I reckon. For self hosting you just want a basic box to run docker containers on. It's really easy to spin things up with docker compose. Which is basically what Umbrel OS is -- a fancy front end for Docker.
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