Do you have any personal recommendations on a good/affordable cloud host for this?

I briefly looked into how much it'd cost to run on an EC2 instance and it seems like it'd be order of $100 - $200 per month while these dedicated game server companies seem to be offering it, fully managed, for only $20/mo! I'm guessing they do this by having larger instances running many people's servers?

I'd prefer to manage and run this myself but when the price is an order of magnitude more to do so, it doesn't seem worth it to self host unless you happen to have a suitable always on home server sitting around.

Why do all of the PalWorld dedicated server repos I see have a crazy amount of stuff going on? I run my friend group server using a 27-line Dockerfile[1], and that could even be compressed a bit without losing any functionality...

[1] https://github.com/jagapher/palserver-container/blob/main/Do...