> I use Linode or DigitalOcean. Pay no more than $5 to $10 a month. 1GB of RAM sounds terrifying to modern web developers, but it is plenty if you know what you are doing.

If you get one dedicated server for multiple separate projects, you can still keep the costs down but relax those constraints.

For example, look at the Hetzner server auction: https://www.hetzner.com/sb/

I pay about 40 EUR a month for this:

  Disk: 736G / 7.3T (11%)
  CPU: Intel Core i7-7700 @ 8x 4.2GHz [42.0°C]
  RAM: 18004MiB / 64088MiB

I put Proxmox on it and can have as many VMs as the IO pressure of the OSes will permit: https://www.proxmox.com/en/ (I cared mostly about storage so got HDDs in RAID 0, others might just get a server with SSDs)

You could have 15 VMs each with 4 GB of RAM and it would still come out to around 2.66 EUR per month per VM. It's just way more cost efficient at any sort of scale (number of projects) when compared to regular VPSes, and as long as you don't put any trash on it, Proxmox itself is fairly stable, being a single point of failure aside.

Of course, with refurbished gear you'd want backups, but you really need those anyways.

Aside from that, Hetzner and Contabo (opinions vary about that one though) are going to be more affordable even when it comes to regular VPS hosting. I think Scaleway also had those small Stardust instances if you want something really cheap, but they go out of stock pretty quickly as well.