Low-cost VPSs are great, but their uptime is usually garbage. I myself run almost everything on a 9€/mo Contabo box (6c, 16GB) and while it's nice and powerful, it gets randomly rebooted way more often than acceptable (and I've heard similar about other hosts). For the "I'll get an angry phone call if the app is down for half an hour at 4 am" category of projects, the cost of a reliable enough VPS comes very close to the equivalent in the cloud, where you also get the benefit of pointing a finger at your provider if something goes wrong.