There are tons of cloud providers that offer different types of servers with a lot of different options. I will talk about the ones I tried/tested and compare them here so people can choose which one suits them better.
AWS EC2 Instances
AWS EC2 instances provide a lot of different options but I will recommend the free tier
options. If you create a new account, for 12 months you will have 750 free hours in the
following instance types: t2.micro and t3.micro.
The rest of the instance types offer much more CPU/RAM than 1 CPU and 1 GB RAM, but I do not recommend them because nobody on earth understands how the billing system works for EC2 — it is not an exact number and the bill may vary from month to month due to on-demand usage. So I only recommend the free tier to have a "free" VPS to play with. → aws.amazon.com
Linode
Linode has a special place in my heart because it was the first VPS I bought a few years ago and I still have a few of them. Linode is a pentester/bug-bounty friendly cloud provider. I got like 2 tickets in 3 years asking me about traffic going out from my VPS to bug bounty sites, but after explaining what I was doing, they left a note and I didn't have any more problems with them. Fair prices, really good performance, and it's really rare to see their services going "down" or a "force shutdown" for maintenance.
Fast to set up, and fast to delete the VPS if you don't need it anymore.
Referral for $100 discount in the first 60 days after you create your account.
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean offers the same VPSs as Linode at the same price. I used it a lot when testing axiom. The problem I faced here is that when support made me a ticket to ask me what the account was for, and why I needed so many VPSs, they blocked my access and shut down the "Droplets" (or VPSs, whatever you want to name it) for the duration the ticket was open.
Although that isn't a really big problem, it was not a very good experience for me, so that's why I prefer Linode. Both offer the same VPSs at the same prices, so good customer service made me stay with Linode.
Scaleway Dedibox
OK, here is when things start to get interesting. Scaleway Dedibox offers great VPSs at a really good price: scaleway.com/en/dedibox/pricing
Although the prices are in euros and not in dollars, the prices are less than Linode/DigitalOcean. The VPSs have good performance with good specs.
The downside is you can't select a lot of locations and it is pretty restricted (there isn't an option for US). I have an 8 GB RAM & 8 CPU core box for 21 euros a month there; if you are looking for performance (more CPUs/RAM), this might be a really good option.
Note: 8 GB in DigitalOcean/Linode would be $40 a month.
Contabo
Contabo is by far the cheapest one of all the ones I've seen. The difference here is:
- You pay a set-up fee when you create/buy the VPS — it's "one-time".
- You pay for the full month; you can't buy it and delete it in the middle of the month (well, you can, but you will still pay the full month).
If you are looking for a long-term VPS that you know you will use for a long time, and you are looking for a good CPU/RAM ratio, then Contabo might be for you. There were a lot of different options for configurations and good regions to select.
Downsides I had: tickets would take 2–3 days to respond, trouble paying for the VPS, etc… it gave me a few problems.