Seriously, I pay $20 for a VPS with good stats and 3TB of outbound bandwidth per month. It's with Linode, who have been apparently hard hit, but I've suffered about 10 minutes of downtime over the course of the last 2 years, and all of that was in the past week, when the DDOS crap started. Since then it's been fine.
I have been a big fan of linode in the past, I still have a fair amount with them but honestly at this point I'm seriously considering AWS even at the increased cost (which compared to my time isn't that large really and reputational cost which is).
This is the third time they've had a critical breach in the past 5 or so years, and that's excluding all the DDoS downtime they've had in that time span. I stopped using them after their second breach, and frankly am glad I did. I'm very happy with Digital Ocean.
I was a Linode customer back when it first happened.
I found out on Slashdot/Reddit first and got the email from Linode about 3 days later. I have known ever since then that Linode is the type of provider you don't want to be involved with. A VPS provider has one responsibility above all else: be honest and transparent.
Yes, with Linode and other VPS providers we get good amount of bandwidth quota. Also if you have 2 instances running then they combine the monthly quota for you. But, how much network capacity one can use is actually limited by the network connectivity the machine offers.
For example, the $20 a month VPS on Linode offers only 250 Mbps connectivity (outgoing bandwidth). So as soon as you saturate that, you need one more VPS to handle the load. So this leaves a lot of bandwidth quota unused. Especially since in the real world traffic tends to come in spikes. AWS is similar, depending on the instance size the network connectivity differs. This makes the calculations for estimating costs for hosting even more difficult.
yeah, but 250 Mbps will chew up your bandwidth quota in a day or 2... so you already needed more quota anyways... unless your traffic is incredibly spiky.