Ask HN: Affordable dev server solution

I assume you've looked at Amazon EC2? They offer VMs at a wide variety of price/performance points.

There are cheaper options, but they all involve a lot more work, IMO (especially if you may need to deploy and remove servers regularly, as it sounds like you might).

Edit: they have a free tier, which may be enough to get you started.

ideally I want to keep it running forever - so it need to be cheap enough

The "cloud" ones are very expensive, some cheaper alternatives are like hetzner.de ovh.com online.net soyoustart.com but they may not come with the same level of support/uptime.

Don't overlook DigitalOcean too soon. They charge by the hour, so you can snapshot and destroy your server when you're not using it.

this is a good point, although does not provide large hard drive with cheaper price - I might need to mix it with other solution.