[brimble]

Can confirm for the specific task of a Minecraft server that a Pi4 beats the pants off the first few tiers of DO VPS. You have to get up to a cost equivalent of nearly buying a (bottom-tier) Pi per month to get close.

One problem with these VPS is contention for physical CPU between multiple tenants. Lots of CPU context-switching. Kills performance. You can get dedicated-CPU VPS, but at that point you're basically renting a fraction of a real server and the prices tend to be high.

A $100-$150 old x86 workstation or server off Ebay will do even better (I run several things, including a Minecraft server, on mine, and it performs great for all of it), but your power use will be much higher than with a Pi.