You have a ton of good, budget-friendly options if you just need a private VM or small managed instance rather than a full AWS/Azure rack. Providers like DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, Hetzner or OVH will give you a “private” VPS (with its own IP and resources) for as little as $3–$5 USD per month if you stick to the smallest tiers (1 GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 25–30 GB SSD). Those same tiers typically charge by the hour (so you only pay for what you use), but they cap out at the flat monthly rate if you run 24/7.