I will second this. I have two of these very cheap VPSes from OVH mentioned in the article, one in France and one in Québec, and in my experience they have been very reliable and have good performance for their price. In my experience, for "hobbyist" use cases having more RAM is more important than having a 1 Gbps connection - most of the time your stuff will not be that popular to the outside world, but you might want to experiment with different tools which will explode if you only have 512 MB of RAM (as Vultr offers on their new 2.50$ plan).

I will also second the comment on the confusing offerings of OVH, though. Their three brands are one thing, the other thing is that even their main OVH website looks totally different (with different products being offered) depending on which country you select on the top right. I have the feeling they are working on this right now (their different country websites are beginning to look more and more similar), but it can be really confusing. Also, chances are high that you will end up in some French configuration menu eventually. (I can understand that they will find this a bit unfair, as all the other players of course can just develop their websites in their native language and don't have to worry about this. But still it's not that professional.)

On the other hand, for a German test I find it interesting that they didn't include netcup, which also offers very cheap and high-quality VPSes from Germany (although they suffer from the same confusion regarding their websites - when you switch to English the products are different and for some reason much more expensive than on the German version).

And then, of course, there is also time4vps.eu if you want to go really cheap.

For us the requirement is hourly billing and being able to get a working machine within a minute, so no Netcup :). Also, only the network test was performed mainly in Frankfurt. All other tests were Frankfurt, Strasbourg, Haarlem (Location 1) and New York, NJ, NJ, Canada, Paris (Location 2)

Ah, okay, I overlooked the "spin up a new virtual machine within seconds" in the article, sorry for that, and the requirement of multiple locations makes sense too! That way the choice of providers makes much more sense to me (as it also excludes Hetzner, for example).

hetzner is a badass predator, competitors murder.

My experience as well. I often use the super inexpensive OVH VPSs and I have never had any problems. The price is amazing.

Or that they limit what you can use in your passwords (no accents for example).