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.
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.