Though I'm not a big fan of centralization, I use cloudflare. Their DDoS protection is unmatched, they have scraping protection, and just in case they decide to screw their users over, switching to another service is trivial.
Matrix works perfectly for me, if you're setting up a new server, I'd go with tuwunel. I'm stuck on synapse, when the tuwunel team makes a way to migrate, I'll do it.
Yeah, it is incredibly fascinating.