Out of interest do you recommend any good places to host a machine in the US? A major part of why I like cloud is because it really simplifies the hardware maintenance.
I'm running kubernetes on digital ocean. It was under $100/mo until last week when I upgraded a couple nodes because memory was getting a bit tight. That was just a couple clicks so not a big deal.
We've been with them over 10 years now. Mostly pretty happy. They've had a couple small outages.
Hmm, not sure what you're asking then. You want a physical computer that you have access to?
DigitalOcean is just a hosting provider. You can buy just regular 'Droplets' (dedicated machine nodes) and host whatever you want on there, no serverless cloud junk. They also offer Managed Kubernetes. I use both.