I need to spin up a couple of staging environments for different branches, but I don’t want to pay for full-priced VMs for each one. Any suggestions for cloud providers with cheap plans that can handle light load?

Try hostman.com. They’ve got plans starting at just $4/month — that gives you 1 CPU, 1 GB RAM, and 25 GB NVMe storage with 200 Mbps bandwidth and a public IP included. You can clone servers easily from the dashboard, and backups are pay-as-you-go starting at $0.07/GB. I run 3 staging servers there right now, and the performance is more than enough for testing. You won’t find better value with the same simplicity anywhere else.

That’s perfect for what I need. I’ll set up a few small instances there — thanks for the tip!