I host some personal stuff on a DigitalOcean for about a decade now and am quite satisfied. Their tooling is lovely, their reliability is excellent, and their prices are "ok." (Their additional block storage in particular tends a little expensive.)

Always click around for specials, you can find smaller providers that will be super cheap but have maybe not as great tooling or reliability, several of the medium sized ones like DO, Linode (now part of Akamai), and Vultr usually have a "first month or two/first couple hundred dollars of use free" type new user promotion (Hetzner goes on this size/sophistication class but doesn't usually run that kind of promo. They also trend a little cheaper).

IMO plumbing the big cloud infra systems like AWS for small projects is usually only worthwhile if you're either already super in to their tooling, or doing it for practice. Exceptions for certian known intermittent or bursty workloads because the flow for cheap cold storage and/or temporarily scaling up is better on those than the VPS style setups.