Digital ocean droplets are great for a $5/month cloud for toy projects. Extremely easy setup. I use it for running an instance of "https://thelounge.github.io " and a few other projects which essentially pays for itself since it's replacing a $5/month irccloud membership. I don't know, aws or google cloud or azure might have something similar, but the elastic pricing style options were less appealing for my use case when I was checking out the options.

Most cloud providers have hourly billing (if not smaller). So you can spin up some instances of what you want to try and will only be billed a small amount.

For Google Cloud, a compute engine f1-micro instance is only $4.09/month. Standing it up for only 24 hours is $0.19.

As well, both Amazon and Google have budgets you can set on your account that can notify you if you go over some thresholds you setup. This can help prevent you from spending too much money.

I also recommend Digital Ocean for quick/cheap personal toy services, but for projects of enduring duration and reliability pricing calculators are totally public for AWS[1] and GCP[2]. I haven't seen any direct comparison calculators as everyone's particular mileage/needs may vary.

The good news is that at scale, the days of compute, storage, and data management becoming easy to use utilities to plug into are here, or near. The bad news is it still feels a bit too 'big' to plug small lamps into the main AWS or Cloud Platform grids, but I suspect those days are numbered as well.

[1]: https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html [2]: https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/

(Disclaimer: I’m a Google employee, dealing with Cloud, loving all options, but especially being able to have options.)

Spot instances are pretty good for cheapskates who want to play with cloud stuff.

And they would quickly demonstrate the value Kubernetes brings to the table when the spots are terminated out from underneath your app (yes, provided the Kubernetes API and etcd are running on the survivors ;-) )

Do you know about the AWS free tier? You can get an EC2 micro instance for free for 1 year. When it runs out it might be worth switching to Digital Ocean.

OVH is really cheap and good. https://ovh.com

Agreed, but a word of caution if you're working with single VPSes.

When a VPS has problems don't waste time to open a ticket to their support. They were never able to fix anything on my VPSes the 2 or 3 times I had problems since I started using them in December 2010.

Try to reboot the VPS from the web manager. If that doesn't fix the problem create another VPS immediately and let the original one expire at the end of the period you paid for. I suggest to pay per month and to have an automated installation script. Make backups for the data and make sure they can be transferred to the new VPS.

OVH has other offerings such has cloud and private cloud services. I never used them so the support there could be better.

Another tip: don't ask for support via a ticket, but just call them. That works a lot better. (At least their German support does)

scalaway is also perfect for personal projects https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/

- €5.99/Month (4 x86 64bit Cores; 4GB Memory; 100GB SSD Disk ;1 Flexible public IPv4 )