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Cheapest linode is $5/month. Not sure why you'd need one that is $20/month

And LowEndBox has a reasonable list of $1/month servers. And that's not as low as it goes either.

NAT VPS. Under $10/Year

> more reliable than your VM that falls over when it's full of logs (at some indeterminate future date)

If this is an issue, I think all other solutions have similar risks: account banned, company acquired/closed down, forced update to new API/system, to a point that I think I'd take the bet on a VM living longer in most cases

I charge my clients $550 an hour, so a $240 a year solution which takes 15 mins to set up is what I would choose over the time consuming alternatives offered.

I think you are just more used to creating a VM and running crons from there. The other alternatives aren't necessarily time consuming, you just aren't used to them