I had been using Bluehost, which was a cheap way to host a bunch of websites. But I was running into a blocker - you need to have a dedicated IP address for each site in order to have ssl. Digital Ocean's cheapest option (aka droplet) is $5/month, and I thought would be powerful enough to run this little site.
Most of the professional websites I work on are hosted on Pantheon. The platform is tuned for Drupal, and you know that it has the tools and support to run important websites. However, prices start at $50/mo, which can be a little too much sometimes for a small client or personal project.
There is a hidden cost to cheap hosting - setup time. The box may say it's $5/mo, but if the developer takes 10 hours to set it up, you may not be saving any money. More tools IE services and monitoring take more time and experience to configure. It can be worth it to have those advanced things, but pass on responsibility of maintaining them to a 3rd party.
Step 1: Create LEMP droplet.
Step 2: Configure database.
Step 3: Configure nginx.
Step 4: Create git repository.
Step 5: Install Drupal.