Minimums for a VPS should be closer to $5-10 a month, no?

Yeah they can be cheap, but I would definitely recommend having at least 3 for redundancy. If one get shut down or it's IP blacklisted you still hopefully have a backup line to create a replacement.

No, unless you pay month to month. If you wait till BF you can find some really good deals on sites like lowendspirit

The cheapest AWS EC2 instance is $3/mo