So… I found a cheap VPS for me to play around with on LowEndBox after a few weeks of lurking on their site.
$12/year for 256MB ‘guaranteed’ RAM, 15GB of disk space and 300GB of bandwidth. I am pleased.
Except for the fact that it’s an CentOS OpenVZ instance, and I have had bad experiences with OpenVZ.
But other than being unable to run HLDS (runs out of RAM, gets killed by the host), nothing else has had problems. Got nginx, mysql & php-fpm on it following www.mellzamora.com/install-nginx-php-5-4-php-fpm-on-centos6/
I was pretty surprised though – First login showed only ~15MB of RAM used. WITH Apache running. (But no PHP or external modules.) But still. 15MB.
Now, as for uses of it… well, that’s yet to be established. I’ll probably be moving my IRC bot over from EC2, because the credit on that is running out end of October.
As for more configs:
www.digitalocean.com/community looks like it has a bunch of tutorials on getting nginx and the like set up
And github.com/KnightSwarm/Minstall has stuff on minimal installs.