I've variously paid $5-$30 a month for a VPS/dedicated server to host all my random side projects over almost two decades, including websites for other people, email, etc; there's probably two dozen or more sites running on my Hetzner dedicated server, with storage and CPU and RAM to more than spare. And not once had to worry about extra fees or weird billing issues. Bandwidth has grown from 100Mbps to 1Gbps and I've never had traffic issues.

And this is a cloud service is it not?

A dedicated server isn't usually considered a "cloud" service. It's a physical server allocated to you, with unmetered bandwidth and local disk.

Where do you get bare metal servers for that cheap? I assumed by VPS you were talking about a VM

The VPS was a VM, but I moved from that to dedicated a long time ago.

Hetzner has nice dedicated servers for €33/mo:

https://www.hetzner.com/sb

I'm on an older one that just got bumped up to €29/mo due to increasing electricity prices; it was €21/mo until now, and I can't blame them for that one. The specs are E3-1245 V2 / 16GB / 2x3T, there's over 45 vhosts on it across ~25 wwwroots plus other random services, and CPU usage is basically nothing. The cores are really there just to handle bursty stuff. Most random side projects and small websites don't need almost any resources on modern hardware.

Previously I was on a Scaleway Dedibox, which go as low as €15/mo right now. It was €10 at one point even.

https://www.scaleway.com/en/dedibox/start/start-2-s-sata/

> and pay an ISP $$$ for unusually high upload bandwidth/throughput?

But the ISPs I know do not bill $$$ if you use the max bandwidth (max bandwith they did advertize to you btw) for a sustained amount of time: they'll just start throttling you.

Anyway GP ain't asking about "cloud vs hosting at home" but about "cloud vs dedicated server(s)".