All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Budget Openstack / cloudstack IaaS vendors with small instances (256mb?)
I know that iwstack no longer offers their 384mb instance-type.
(not sure about their dallas zone)
Next smallest instance(512Mb) comes to $3.25/m with the minimum 10gb root volume. (~$0.045/hr at current euro rates)
Also, checked out lunanode's openstack offering($0.05/hr for 512Mb). Both seem good for just learning/practicing cloud automation with inexpensive hourly instances.
I am getting rid of a bunch of (cumulatively) expensive 'deals' I've picked up that are just idling away 24/7 until the renewal date comes up on the 1st of the month 
.
Any new entrants in the arena that could help keep my education budget low, by supporting even cheaper hourly instances?
I am fine with $30-35 deposit like most of them require. But snapshots/restore are a must.
Assuming iwstack has a 9/10 rating, give your nominations a score too (out of 10)
(iwstack would be my no-brainer choice if this was production-quality usage)
Comments
It is hard to have smaller instances.
With deep regret had to drastically reduce the usage of ours, because of the abuse generated. Most people using the minimum instance do not understand that swap is not memory, besides the regular abuse with mysql poorly configured, without caching, etc.
The change greatly improved stats across the board and the difference in cost is not that big, so, I do not know if others will go this route.
384 MB proved great with OVZ, but KVM is a different beast.