The trick is to get a fully remote job in the US- one that is asynchronous and doesn’t have a significant time-zone dependency, and then travel.

1. Wait 6 months, save your $13.
2. Buy a cheap used Dell or Lenovo workstation.
3. Run that as a server.

Beyond that, I’m not sure if you are going to find anything that will work well for $13 a month. Digital Ocean’s $8/month droplet will only give you a single vCPU and 1GB of RAM. Running docker and a postgres DB off that alone is going to be hell.

OVH has a discount right now. Their $14.70/month VPS is $10.29. That’s 2 vCores and 4GB of RAM.

Almost all cheap solutions heavily cap bandwidth though, so if you are transferring lots of data to and from, or have lots of traffic, you’ll be in trouble.

I mean… where did you go?

I’ve been all over Europe and I find most places in Europe look older than the US. But there are plenty of places in the US that are old and outdated.