They often have a couple of servers with no setup.
The setup fee is a one-time fee though, so if you have a server for many years that won't hurt so much. I pay around €30/month for the server I am renting but I know it will last a long time even if I get spikes on any on my many projects. For a 8 core, 16GB droplet/vps at DigitalOcean it will cost you ~$96/month. The performance is better at Hetzner for about 1/3 the cost.
Yes. I'm talking about occasional needs for a small server for a month or two.
They have VPS cloud offerings similar to DigitalOcean as well, with no setup fees.
Why not go with hertzner cloud? No setup fees and you'll be billed by the usage. Still cheaper than other cloud providers.
The VM performance tax is huge. Also, no GPU and limited/paid traffic (large limit though).