Why not use Joplin? Open-source, very flexible, I run it on a bunch of devices and sync it via a EU cloud provider over S3 in an encrypted bucket…

Seconding Hetzner. I recently went on a bibge and moved as many services away from US based companies over to EU based ones, Hetzner being my choice for webhosting, S3 storage and VPS (which I rarely need thanks to my homelab).

To follow up on this, I’d look to network segmentation as another useful security barrier. I’ve just started playing around with VLANs, but the way I plan on setting things up is to have individual VLANs for services, management and IoT, with the LAN for all other user-land devices. On top of this you add strict firewall rules to what can talk to what, on which ports, etc. So all devices on the network can do DNS queries to my two DNS servers, for instance, but things from my services VLAN can’t reach anything outside of this VLAN…