Member OP
Three years ago I provisioned a 512 MiB KVM instance with Contabo for exactly six United States dollars annually. The node has experienced zero unplanned outages since 2023-08-18. Uptime currently sits at 99.97 percent.
Specifications remain unchanged: single core, 512 MiB memory, 10 GiB storage, 500 GiB transfer. I run a static site, a private WireGuard tunnel per RFC 9421, and a small monitoring stack.
The control panel is primitive. There is no API. Ticket response time averages 14 hours. Yet the price never increased, the network never degraded, and the hypervisor has not been restarted for a kernel panic in this entire period.
I am not recommending this provider universally. I am documenting that such arrangements still exist, actually, against prevailing assumptions about the low-end market.