Not true. An AWS EC2 instance is a VPS. If you sign up for a new AWS account, you can get a "micro" instance on their free-tier free for 12 months (750 hours/month for 12 months). More information on their free-tier here.
Even after a free-tier expires, as long as you're correctly allocating resources based on what you need, the price structure can be comparable or much cheaper. The trade-off is complexity. AWS offers a lot of services that you can leverage but you'll need to educate yourself so you don't get a big bill. But even then there are alarms and limits you can set on resource consumption so you don't go over your budget.
AWS is very generous with their Lambda offering and for small projects, I doubt that you'll ever need to pay anythings (in free tier, it offers "1M free requests per month and 400,000 GB-seconds of compute time per month.") which in my guess is the best offering you could have.
On the top of all this, the best part is if you learn AWS then you can not only use it in your pet project but the same learnings can also be applied in your place of work (I doubt that they will use "VPS") which means you'll get promoted faster!
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Not true. An AWS EC2 instance is a VPS. If you sign up for a new AWS account, you can get a "micro" instance on their free-tier free for 12 months (750 hours/month for 12 months). More information on their free-tier here.
Even after a free-tier expires, as long as you're correctly allocating resources based on what you need, the price structure can be comparable or much cheaper. The trade-off is complexity. AWS offers a lot of services that you can leverage but you'll need to educate yourself so you don't get a big bill. But even then there are alarms and limits you can set on resource consumption so you don't go over your budget.
Just to add a few more things: