For most personal projects, hosting on the cloud may be overkill, but tempting with its supposed ease of use and benefits of scale. Self-hosting is often overlooked as a solution with the benefit of simplicity and cost.
Interesting discussion and demonstration of self hosting the kinds of apps most personal projects will end being.
Plenty of places with $5 per month VPS
With sudo access? Can you suggest some? I did tons of research and rarely found anything less than $70/month.
Yup, many are mentioned in the comments alongside mine. Linode is my option of choice.