By my standards (lowendspirit.com) $5/month is kind of high end for a VPS. I have a small personal web site on a $4 per year VPS. Other than that I have another VPS (I think around $7/m with 500GB of HDD) that I use as a personal storage server and git repo since its internet connection is much faster than my home one, etc. For a while I ran some monitoring tasks on VPSes, though I don't have any active right now.

tierhive.com has super cheap VPS, as low as 10 cents/month for a tiny one (128MB ram, 1GB SSD). ipv6 only, with a NAT proxy for ipv4 I think. It's quite possible to run a useful basic Debian server on that. I ran one with 32MB ram for a while.