Hetzner is the cheapest credible cloud target. A CX22 (2 vCPU, 4 GB) runs the standard tier for around €4 a month.

Why cloud-init rather than an image

Hetzner does not accept arbitrary image uploads on standard accounts, so this target ships as a cloud-init recipe instead of a baked image. The server builds itself on first boot from a pinned recipe.

The trade-off is honest: this path does not get the reproducibility guarantees of a baked image, because it assembles at boot from upstream packages. If provenance matters more than convenience, build the qemu-x86_64 image locally and upload it via Hetzner’s rescue system.

Create the server

In Hetzner Cloud Console, create a server: Ubuntu 24.04, type CX22 or larger, in a location near you.
Copy the recipe from the picker with hetzner-cloud selected.
Paste it into the Cloud config field under User data.
Add your SSH key and create.

First boot takes five to ten minutes while it installs and bakes.

Reaching it

The server has a public IP, so http://<ip> reaches the wizard directly. Do the setup promptly — a fresh box with an open wizard on a public address should not sit there overnight.

Once the device is linked to your account, use the tunnel instead and close the public port entirely:

deputyctl tunnel --integrated

The device then holds an outbound connection and is reachable at its tunnel URL, with nothing inbound exposed.

Sizing and cost

Type	vCPU	RAM	~Cost	Suits
CX22	2	4 GB	€4/mo	Standard tier, cloud models
CX32	4	8 GB	€7/mo	Comfortable headroom
CX42	8	16 GB	€17/mo	Small local models

Local inference on shared vCPU is slow. If you want local models, dedicated hardware is better value than scaling a VPS up.