Well, it’s cheap until a badly behaved script starts sending lots of data and Amazon charges your card a huge bill (unless they’ve finally got around to hard price caps?)
None of these 4 providers do hard caps. If a lack of hard caps is your complaint, file it against all of them.
Lightsail instances each include at least 1TB of transfer each month, which is the same as DigitalOcean. Vultr and Linode also charge network overage fees on a per gigabyte basis if you transfer too much. Absolutely, everyone should set up billing alerts on any of these services.
I'm not here to say Lightsail is the absolute best option, just an option.
I get them from the aggregator https://lowendbox.com when companies offer deals; some have been great, some poor, but all very cheap; I think $14/year has been a decent one.
Although my current one only has 512MB RAM and isn’t enough for Rust to compile Scryer Prolog. Prolog, a language first run on the computers of 1971 and standardised around 1998.
I use Linode (now Akamai Cloud). Oddly the "Linode 1GB" plan doesn't seem to have a link - you can find it in the shared cpu section under "Nanode 1GB" https://www.linode.com/pricing/#compute-shared.
The impression I get is that most $5 VPSes are basically the same, although I've really only used Linode. They give you some useful free stuff like an external firewall/router and monitoring (with only 24 hours of history, but that's plenty). Their docs and scripts are really good too if, like me, you're only a dilettante sysadmin.
The biggest bang for your buck will be with Contabo. I've tried OVH and Cloudfanatic as well, but recently settled on Contabo just because it's cheaper
- https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/
- https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets