I feel ya @Henning Jacobs,

I'm really not a fan of AWS for private stuff (out of nowhere bills and accidentally leftover assets sitting in far away forgotten regions i never check)

I'm sticking with the DigitalOcean IP relay for now. I created a bunch of VPSes and noticed that the ping and speed differences were minimal between them (a 5ms difference).

I actually really love the 5 or so raspberry pi's and the nuc sitting in a drawer here at home keeping most of my sites & infrastructure running. It's bit more of an investment, but I really love the tinkering aspect (especially the northern-lights-sensors kind of tinkering)