If it needs to be in the US, digital ocean or linode are pretty cheap. But OVH and hetzner are pry the best overall.

I’d recommend Hetzner. They have many good options for a server with good prices and a Lemmy instance can be run on a server with lesser specs. The servers can be easily created and managed with a web UI. Like, my instance runs on a server with a dual core CPU, 4 gigs of ram and 40 gigs of disk space. It costs only ~6 € per month.

OVH probably has the cheapest backup now after what happened ;) I think this instance runs on OVH.

Netcup is also quite good.

I use Vultr they are fine for the price but I plan to look for alternatives as well (just to see if there is something better out.

stuxhost

Hetzner has something that several other hosting providers do not have, an “official” way to install Arch Linux https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/operating-systems/standard-images/ This is relatively new, a friend pointed me to this some time ago. Previously you could still install it in a custom way yourself, for example : https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/User:PMay/Hetzner_step_by_step

BuyVM and Scaleway.

I recommend AWS. You can get a t4g.micro (2 cores/1 GB memory, more than enough for Lemmy) for free until June 2021 (they keep extending it). And after that, it would only be ~$7/month with 8 GB of storage. You could also use EC2 Spot and get that down to ~$2-3

Better stay away from shady free domains. If you can, get your own (self-hosted)) servers (like me ).