If you stick with the known good providers, things usually work out well.
I’m running my Lemmy and Mastodon servers on a VPS I got from GreenCloudVPS during their 9th birthday celebration: 9 cores (old Intel Xeon E5 though), 9GB RAM, 99GB NVMe SSD for $99 every three years (effectively $2.75/month). I haven’t had any issues with it, and it’s located very close to me so the ping time is <10ms.
I’m running my email server on a similar VPS but with fewer cores on a much newer AMD EPYC processors.
Any companies that have been around 5+ years are usually fine. Hosthatch is the main host I use and I think they’ve been around 10 or 11 years now. They sporadically have very good sales on Lowendtalk.com