[LinuxBender]

Many people will have opinions on this, including me. :-) From my own experience, reliable VPS providers that are less expensive than AWS would be Linode and Vultr. Vultr natively supports iPXE if that is something you want to learn as well. Both have pay-as-you-go plans, meaning if you want to destroy the VM's after 5 days, then you only pay for 5 days. Both have very fast VM's.

[jolmg]

> meaning if you want to destroy the VM's after 5 days, then you only pay for 5 days

At least with Linode, you pay per hour. I haven't had a need for it, but I imagine some do appreciate being able to rent a super-powerful server for a few hours/minutes at affordable prices. They have different types of servers, too, depending on what you need.

https://www.linode.com/pricing/

[mangatmodi]

I agree, so I am collecting as many names I could from experienced folks for my research :)

[LinuxBender]

For learning infrastructure related tasks and methods, I would also suggest reading all the questions and answers on serverfault. [1] Use care when posting questions on that site, as they expect everything to be related to your profession in a professional setting (vs Hobby / Lab settings)

[1] - https://serverfault.com/

[mtmail]

3 USD/month is possible, adding https://www.hetzner.com/cloud and https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/ to the list.

Below that price you might have to pay per year (it's not worth for them to have customer spending less, a single support email wipes their profit). Or you end up with an unreliable discount hoster. And my discount I mean a company that might not be profitable enough to continue https://www.zdnet.com/article/20-vps-providers-to-shut-down-...