Just use Hetzner Cloud. They’re great. And if you want really cheap and low end stuff, have a look at https://lowendstock.com/

I generally use Digital Ocean, but I was also informed recently that Hetzner has new US datacenters, which would significantly lower latency for me. Might be something to look into in the future.

I’d recommend giving Hetzner a look, they’re similar to Linode/Digital Ocean/etc., but they’re a bit cheaper. They’re a European company, but they’ve recently added a couple North American locations.

Another vote for Hetzner Cloud, if you don’t mind it being in Germany, you can get even more memory and other specs on their ARM based ones. It does has pretty cheap backups and has DDoS protection and some basic firewall stuff built in all their VPSes.