A VPS can be very useful for developing and testing web scripts. You can also learn about the nuts and bolts of managing servers by playing around with your VPS. For development and testing purposes, I wouldn’t recommend a high end VPS. These can cost up to $25 or 30 per month and are a good option for hosting live websites that get decent amounts of traffic.
Though it seems like a difficult possibility, there are some providers who offer VPSes for as low as $10 or 15 per year. These come with low CPU power and memory but are good enough for developing and testing scripts. When new companies enter the VPS hosting market, they face intense competition and so have to make irresistible offers to get new customers. I believe that is the reason why these cost so less.
When it comes to reliability, we cannot be very certain. If the hardware and the infrastructure are good enough, there is no reason why the VPS shouldn’t function properly. In some cases, there may be slow performance or downtime. For this reason, it is not a good idea to host your main sites on such low cost VPSes. However, if you have small sites that have only static HTML pages, you can use these without any problem.
Here are some low cost VPS providers (approx. $10/year)
1) FastVPS (http://www.fastvps.co/vps-hosting.php)
Features:
15GB Disk Space
1TB Bandwidth
1 Core CPU
128MB RAM
256MB Burst RAM
Instant Setup
1 Free IP Address (es)
Price: $12/Year
2) Hostitek (https://my.hostitek.com/cart.php?a=confproduct&i=0)
Features:
Chicago – VZSP
Disk Space : 10GB
Bandwidth : 250GB
RAM : 128MB/256MB
1 IP
Price: $12/Year
I will be listing more providers every few days. For more offers, you can check WHT (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=104).