Until recently I had a 4gb ram 80gb ssd+2tb hd VPS running debian in a Montreal data centre with a real use 700 mbit pipe to my city with a budget provider for the equivalent of $80USD/year. When fio speeds were slow they moved me to a less crowded server. I gave it up as don't need it and moved my personal sites back to NFS for peanuts a year and services to my NAS. The pricing, offsite storage for my backups, Canadian sovereignty, lack of perceived complexity with a big provider was all attractive. I'm a physician with a tech hobby and last serious tech work was in the LAMP days with perl and php. Trying to think of learning about AWS and screwing up usage based billing was daunting!
> Trying to think of learning about AWS and screwing up usage based billing was daunting!
One of the hard rules we learned pre-pandemic was that services attached to usage based billing should really exit on error. It's a lesson I'm keeping in mind working with agents and routing (and the main reason I'm local-first).
Assuming there is no some kill switch which would render a whole infra including hardware inoperable.