Currently I user Digital Ocean, but it lacks a lot of features needed to setup a proper system.
What are some good cheap vps providers for personal use?
For startups, I know people have been suggesting AWS and Azure, but are there any good alternatives available?
Linode.com is also pretty reliable + fast (though I do realize they are right now experiencing a datacenter being down).
I use to have lots of small vps's going (I was a regular on lowendbox.com) back a few years ago (some were dev, some were for clients, some were just all the open source projects I was working on. It all boils down to exactly what you want to get out of it (also where in the world you want to host it). For instance right now i just need two low-end openvz nodes that don't pull in much traffic, hence my choice with continuing with ramhost.us rather than Ramnode or linode (they've got small packages + frequent discounts for new accounts). Another option i would have easily chosen would be hostigation.com. These aren't for big production sites though (although i'm sure they'd handle them without a glitch).
My biggest suggestion is stay away from any service that has hosting as a secondary option (i.e. all the domain registrars and hosts who have shared hosting as their primary source of business).
[0] https://bigv.io/ [1] https://robot.your-server.de/order/market/country/GB
IMO aws/etc aren't "VPS providers".
If you just want a virtualised machine, they're worse in many ways because you have to work around the "features" of the platform.
If you want an actual VPS provider (or even dedicated hardware or a mix of both), I recommend RimuHosting.
If you want to buy into the platform lock in of AWS/etc I recommend you re-think your options and goals.
...such as?