It's not $5 per service unless you only have one service. The scaling is the fact that you run more than one thing on it. I run a bunch of stuff on a $5 VPS an

It's not $5 per service unless you only have one service. The scaling is the fact that you run more than one thing on it. I run a bunch of stuff on a $5 VPS and more still on small machines like raspberry pi's and so on behind it. On my distro at least, spinning up a real paravirt container (not docker, a full OS with systemd, SSH, etc) within a VPS is a matter of unzipping a bootstrap to /var/lib/machines and running 'machinectl start whatever-you-called-it'. It's just a different set of abstractions to learn, and at least IMO one that's more valuable.