Comment by bigiain

> Yeah but for $6/mo you can get a tiny linode or digital ocean droplet

That gets you, what, 1 "vCPU" with maybe a gig of ram and a couple of dozen gig of disk.

If you (or a friend) work for a company of any size, there's probably a cupboard full of laptops that won't upgrade to Win11 sitting there doing nothing that you could get for free just by asking the right person. It'll have 4 or 8 cores, each of which is more powerful that the "vCPU" in that droplet. It'll have 8 or maybe 16gig of ram, and at least half a TB of disk and depending on that laptop quite likely to be able to be configured with half a TB of fast nVME storage and a few TB of slower spinning rust storage.

If you want 8vCPUs/cores, 16GB of ram, and 500GB of SSD, all of a sudden Digital Ocean looks more like $250/month.

If you are somewhere in that grey area where you need more than ivCPU and 1GB of memory, grabbing the laptop out of the cupboard that your PM or one of the admin staff upgraded from last year and shipping not off to a datacenter with your flavour of linux installed seems like it's worth considering.

Hell, get together with a friend and have two laptops hosted for 14Euro/month between you, and be each others "failing hardware" backup plan...