writing as somebody who runs a big collection of bare-metal hypervisors for ISP infrastructure purposes... this post quite honestly just makes me smirk.
I have truly lost track of the numerous instances, and number of people who would be better served by buying a $1200 test/development 1U dual socket server with a few fast SSDs in it, and putting it in colocation somewhere for a few hundred dollars a month. The costs would be absolutely fixed and known.
On a tight budget? You don't even need to go as far as $1200, I see totally fine test/development environment suitable, Dell 1U servers on eBay right now for under $500 with 128GB of RAM.
Or that would be better off purchasing a fixed-configuration virtual machine (typically running on xen or kvm underneath) that has a certain specific amount of CPU, RAM and storage resources allocated to it which cannot balloon. For a fixed bill per month like $65 or $85.
You want to deploy your weird app on some cloud platform? sure, go for it, once you've got the possible scaling-up cost issues and possible bugs worked out on your own platform.