The hosted email services are not free but they are usually cheap. For example, Namecheap offers hosted email started at just $12 a year (with higher prices for more features).
Based on your experience or thoughts, do you think hosted email with your domain registrar is a good idea? Or do you think this is something to avoid? Could mail delivery be a potential problem?
The alternative is to buy a domain and then set up email forwarding (from your domain registrar) and create an alias with your current personal email account (Gmail, Outlook etc) for sending replies. This is free but it also means mixing business and personal email in a shared inbox. (Depending on your opinion this can be seen either as an advantage or a disadvantage).
So overall, which option do you think is preferable and why? Also any recommendations for domain registrar + hosted email providers much appreciated. Thanks
Essentially what happened a lot was that the domain providers seemed to realize that email hosting was a pain (it is, but it also isn't, depending on your time and resources), and so there were relatively frequent plan changes and service quality changes. It wasn't their core business, and this "core" thing always comes up in internal discussions when people are annoyed by something they're doing which they don't like doing.
Running my own mail server has been easier. G Suite and Fastmail have also been easier.
However I wouldn't call the domain registrar experience a bad experience. So if the numbers add up for you, why not try it?
I'd also treat the business v. personal as a separate problem. For example maybe you could get a personal email at a lower-cost domain name and own two domains, never a bad idea.