I could use AWS or Google, but if I'm just keeping a toy cloud service going. I'm not particularly worried about reliability, and I don't want to spend $30+/month.
For Google Cloud, a compute engine f1-micro instance is only $4.09/month. Standing it up for only 24 hours is $0.19.
As well, both Amazon and Google have budgets you can set on your account that can notify you if you go over some thresholds you setup. This can help prevent you from spending too much money.
The good news is that at scale, the days of compute, storage, and data management becoming easy to use utilities to plug into are here, or near. The bad news is it still feels a bit too 'big' to plug small lamps into the main AWS or Cloud Platform grids, but I suspect those days are numbered as well.
[1]: https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html [2]: https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/
(Disclaimer: I’m a Google employee, dealing with Cloud, loving all options, but especially being able to have options.)
When a VPS has problems don't waste time to open a ticket to their support. They were never able to fix anything on my VPSes the 2 or 3 times I had problems since I started using them in December 2010.
Try to reboot the VPS from the web manager. If that doesn't fix the problem create another VPS immediately and let the original one expire at the end of the period you paid for. I suggest to pay per month and to have an automated installation script. Make backups for the data and make sure they can be transferred to the new VPS.
OVH has other offerings such has cloud and private cloud services. I never used them so the support there could be better.
- €5.99/Month (4 x86 64bit Cores; 4GB Memory; 100GB SSD Disk ;1 Flexible public IPv4 )