When choosing a server, first ask whether you can live with downtime, then whether anyone will maintain it, and only last compare prices

Moderate value
Evidence C
Saves money
Costs a little
Takes some hours
No willpower

In plain words

The three tiers differ not in price but in what you have in hand on the day something goes wrong. A large provider has a filing channel, public credentials, outage notices, compensation terms, and people you can reach. A small provider is half the price, but when it oversells, runs off or is cut off by its upstream, you don't even know whom to ask. A static site with no user data is fine on a VPS that costs a few dozen CNY.

Cost: Cloud hosts from the major cloud providers cost several hundred to several thousand CNY a month. A VPS from a small provider starts at a few dozen CNY a month. A VPS is a small virtual server. Dedicated server hosting starts at several thousand CNY a year, and you have to buy the hardware yourself.
What you get: The three tiers differ not in price but in what you have in hand on the day something goes wrong. Mainstream cloud providers have a filing channel, public credentials, notices when there are faults, compensation terms in the contract, and people you can reach when there is a problem. A small provider can be half the price, but when it oversells, runs off or is cut off by its upstream, you have no one to appeal to, so before talking price, check in the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (工信部) system whether it holds a value-added telecom business license. Dedicated server hosting pays off only when both conditions hold: bandwidth or hardware cost is clearly cheaper, and you have your own people to run it. How to choose: for a static site with no user data, the cheapest VPS is enough. For one with user sign-ups and transactions, pick a cloud host that can scale elastically and take snapshot backups, with backups kept in at least two places.
Notes: The above is a judgment from experience, with no evidence from the literature. The only thing you can actually verify is the provider's license. If you want to save money, save on specifications and bandwidth, not on credentials.
Evidence grade: C : The author's experience or common practice, without direct literature.
Sources: 作者经验，无直接文献
服务商资质与备案的法定要求见本节第 4 条，日志留存 6 个月和等级保护义务见第 11 节第 16 条

Translated from the Chinese original. Original book, section 26, tip 11. This section describes legal rules, mostly mainland China’s. It is general information, not legal advice; for your own case, talk to a lawyer. Content may be out of date and rules differ by place. When you actually deal with an agency, a doctor or a court, follow what local officials, doctors and lawyers tell you. Disclaimer