It doesn't really need to run anything "substantial" though. Running some janky wordpress site with some scabbed-on ecommerce customizations is like 50% of the internet.

a 1vCPU 512mb instance is plenty for most base cases. Maybe you need one additional machine to act as a background worker. I am sure there are some noisy neighbors but to say its underpowered is silly.

I'm calling it underpowered because the $5 one had trouble running my custom ssh daemon. ssh! the cryptography for that shouldn't chug down the server I'm renting from them. a bigger instance from them isn't having the same problems.

you wouldn't be able to run anything substantial with that kind of budget

but GO and pocketbase is on record for supporting 10k concurrent requests per second on low powered VPS