Ask HN: What do you do with your free tier or dirt-cheap VM?

Host https://femto.pw, a free file uploading and downloading service.

What do you use for storage?

MinIO, a S3-compatible file store, running on top of a cluster of ZFS VMs. It just uses the available disk space from my other servers.

Host my automated newsletter http://metadigest.uzpg.me and my blog http://uzpg.me

Host a personal site and use it as an arbitrary shell box from which to test network stuff. I also have it set up so I can route through it when traveling to avoid crappy captive portals and suspect networks.

I use the Digital Ocean $5/month VM to self host my static website (generated via Hugo although I'm not thrilled with it) on Apache, run Grafana and an InfluxDB server and experiment with Unix.

Serious question: why not use github pages to run your static website?

Try one of the awesome-selfhosted solutions.