@strypey @wakest Thats a great list, and I havent had time to look through it for specs and prices, but ideologically it's likely better than the recommendations I would have given. I use ramnode for some servers, they can be pretty cheap and you can definitely get something capable of playing eith node and setting up a pleroma instance for ~$10/mo. Honestly though my main reason for using ramnode is a several year old habit from when they were like one of the cheapest options out there. They probsbly arent anymore.

I need to acknowledge that I do use AWS for some things, especially if I'm not sure about a project and just need to spinup an instance to experiment with and don't want to pay for a month of something. But I also have a prime account so I can have things cheaply sent to Santa Fe, so fuck me probably.

Anyway I digress, another really solid option, especially if you dont need a dedicated host that has a static ip, is to buy a raspberry pi. You can set it up with a minimal distribution if you want, or not, and if you ssh into it over your local area network you will essentially be interacting with it the way you would be a vpn, and you can still build out web apps that are visible to you on your LAN then deploy them to a vpn later if you like. This strategy has some added bonuses of getting to learn a bit more about the physical system.