I mean, I used to rent the $5/month VPS, and it worked well. In fact, it had much nicer developer experience than EC2 for many reasons. But my provider (digitalocean) raised the price, and I don't really need a lot of CPU resources to serve mostly static files plus a couple of tiny server processes that get very very low traffic. So I downsized to a tiny EC2 instance.

I would go back to the 5/mo VPS if it became clearly better than the alternative. I don't really need an IPv4 for what I use it for, though, as long as someone else wants to provide an inexpensive (or free tier) proxy service.