Welcome to Lemmy and this instance! Given that is instance is brand new, feel free to introduce yourself. If you have any suggestions for this instance, questions about the instance, or about me, feel free to ask! My goal is to be as transparent and fair as possible.
I went with Vultr for hosting and it's running on one of their servers in Dallas (closest I could get). It's their AMD high performance cloud compute, 1vCPU, 1 GB Memory, 2 TB bandwidth, 25 GB NVMe storage. Plus auto backups it costs $7.20 a month. Upgrading performance within their cloud compute is super quick an easy so I can bump up performance as needed. The .social TLD ended up being $30 for the year. I also had tons of issue with email so I also set up email through Zoho, which is another $12 a year. All said and done just over $10 a month.
On my to-do list is a post in the support community to keep track of all this in an effort to be as transparent as possible.
I'm learning about this process as I go, and quite a bit from you now. I would like to contribute in any way that makes sense. Time, money, etc, let me know.