Hehe, I started out with good and frugal intentions but my $5/month Hetzner VPS has turned into a $100/month bill. I love exploring all kinds of data, but obviously, if you just do that on an ad hoc basis, the data gets stale. So I just setup some continuous workers and nighly batch jobs that ingest and keep certain data up to date :)

I've opened some of the data up to the public: cvrdb.dk for danish companies (working on granting users access to 'full' extracts of certain parts). ratemyaisite.com which is just a tiny subset of a larger project that I've dubbed commoncrawl-explore (cc-explore), which is run on a subdomain of my personal website, but purely for my own sake.

Making your own devex pleasant is the real game changer imho, not the VPS. I've made it easy for myself to deploy new projects using Dokploy (also tried Coolify).

I don't find the maintenance to be a problem - but part of that is not treating hobby projects as something that has to be enterprise-ready :)