By my standards (lowendspirit.com) $5/month is kind of high end for a VPS. I have a small personal web site on a $4 per year VPS. Other than that I have another VPS (I think around $7/m with 500GB of HDD) that I use as a personal storage server and git repo since its internet connection is much faster than my home one, etc. For a while I ran some monitoring tasks on VPSes, though I don't have any active right now.
tierhive.com has super cheap VPS, as low as 10 cents/month for a tiny one (128MB ram, 1GB SSD). ipv6 only, with a NAT proxy for ipv4 I think. It's quite possible to run a useful basic Debian server on that. I ran one with 32MB ram for a while.
Where do you get it ($4/Year VPS, presumably with IPv4 as it is used for a website) from?
It was a promo from Virmach.com. They offer stuff like that around black friday. I've had it for years. You can run a website on v6 NAT though. v6 providers like Tierhive use HAProxy to forward your traffic from v4 port 80 to your v6. You can also just set up an AAAA record and run a pure v6 website. That would probably work fine for my super low traffic thing.
Does that support HTTP/3 with TLS over QUIC (instead of TCP)
I don't know. Maybe I'll look into it sometime. I think I'd just use v6, or NAT with http/2. If you really need v4 you can still do it pretty cheap. Look on lowendspirit.com.
just signed up for TierHive after reading this. I'm really impressed with their transparency on what they are vs what they aren't:
https://tierhive.com/about.php
IME The amount of time spent on shopping and managing for a cheapo VM isn't worth it, considering you'll likely only be able to fit one service per server.
Id rather have a single more powerful server and host everything there.
Nuts i thought Hetzner had the cheapest options.
Go to LowEndTalk and Hezner will feel like the priciest option. You’ll need a good tolerance for shadiness though.
Having never been on LowEndTalk, what do you mean by shadiness?
It’s a forum for low end providers. You’re dealing with largely unheard of providers often with seemingly impossibly low prices, so you have to wonder if quoted specs are real (yeah before anyone tells me, the “reputable” flat rate providers are also oversubscribed), whether they’ll disappear on moment’s notice or without notice, whether you can trust your data with them, etc.
Yeah, it's totally hit and miss with some of these providers. Some will try to kill your box once it becomes unprofitable.
I have a free VPS from Oracle that's been running for almost a year now, but I sweat about it regularly as it runs all my analytics.
lowendtalk is shady in its own right (long story). lowendspirit is sort of a fork of it and is much better. hostballs.com is another one of those, still around but much slower.
Due to RAMpocalypse prices have greatly increased
They have the cheapest trustworthy options.
Upcloud has the cheapest I found, you can get a full VPS for less than $4.