Its not a secret that no ads on lemmy, which makes the process more difficult paying for hosting to keep your instance only, so tell me!
How do you fund your lemmy instance? do you sell products through lemmy? Donations? how you convince people to donate to your instance? Do you sell subscriptions? how?
A a $5/month VPS from DO/Vultr/Linode/etc (1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, 20/25GB SSD) should be good for quite a while! I have one from Vultr and I run multiple things in there, including lemmy.pt, and haven’t ran into any resource issues. The instance is small, but Lemmy doesn’t take up more than 350MB (server, UI, postgres, pict-rs and email relay), and CPU basically never goes beyond 20% (idles at 5/10).