I once got a super deal for a VPS that had little resources but 4 (FOUR!) public ipv4 for $12/year.

The company went bankrupt in less than two months. I didn't even bother to wonder why.

It's hit and miss. I got lucky with mine, excellent uptime and good connectivity for $8/year (this offer no longer exists).

They do lag behind in terms of security updates, however. Not something I'd use to store anything of real value in these days of SPECTRE, ROWHAMMER, ZombieLoad etc.

Pings from instances to nodequery are 98% on the low end and 99.9% on the high end. It looks like I'm at 500+ days up at impactvps.com, though I used to see cpu and disk degradations somewhat regularly with them. I haven't had any major outages in a few years of use, though one provider went bust recently after an overly-aggressive sale (alpharacks).

I generally run one instance + sqlite and accept the downtime. The next step up might be two vms across two providers + a cheap managed db.

I don't think I have any super strong recommendations. I did become a fan of BuyVM recently due to their $1/month shared sql plan. But, they're apparently they're planning to retire it, which puts them at a similar price point as something like vultr.

Thanks for sharing the insights. Do you think one should stick with $5/month droplets or hit and try the low end VPS?

Depends on the use case. I think the main factors are reliability and security: if it's not a crucial service and isn't handling anything sensitive, then there's no reason to pay more.