I've been using a VM within the Google Compute Engine cloud, for the last two months (mostly from my chromebook, occasionally from a couple of other locations).
Specifically, this is a "small" (g1-small) VM, though there are many other options available.
This comes with a single CPU core and 1.7G of memory (the disk space is provisioned separately).
For perspective, the only one smaller than this is an f1-micro instance (also with a single core, but with 0.6G of memory).
So it makes sense to look at what this costs ...
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For comparison, Digital Ocean has far less flexibility, but I just might switch to it, considering that I have absolutely no plans to ever host a user-facing service or do anything of that sort, on my VM (if I did, there really wouldn't be any point; you want those features, folks – network protection, scalability, all that jazz).
So long as it's just little old me accessing my portable home in the cloud, the $10/mo for a 1G/30G SSD option looks just as good (or $5/mo for 512M; also, DigitalOcean keeps running free trial offers, which are a good way to try out the service).