My experiences have been that these businesses generally disappear after a few months and leave you holding the bag, with a service disruption and data loss.

Recommendations for any “low end box” that’s about $12 a year and not a fly by night scam would be appreciated.

If you up your budget a little, you can get a bog standard Hetzner VPS for $2.50 a month.

Well, the one I have since several years for $8/year was a temporary offer. But if you pick an ISP that has been around for a couple of years with decent reviews on that forum you should be ok. If you wait for a sale (like black Friday) you will have plenty of offers.

I've used ramnode for 4 years with no problems. My usage is extremely light so I don't know what the performance is like.

I've been a Ramnode customer with several $15ish/year VPSes for a few websites and small services since 2012, and can second checking them out.

I've used hostus and alpharacks for multiple years at that price range.

I've used alpharacks and considering the performance of their VPSs, I'm sure they're heavily overselling their services. Same is the case with i83 and their cheap NATed VPSs.

On the other hand, I've been using Frantech/buyVM and the dirt cheap $2.50 VPS from vultr, and never faced any problems with them.

Alpharacks is super spammy and IMO a bit shady. Do not give them an email address that isn't specific to them.

Agreed. Also, Alpharacks has regularly shut down servers of mine and had to give me new VPSes with 100% data loss on the previous servers.

Its a GreenValueHost repeat :c