Not the poster above or if I understand the difference between a VPS and an unmanaged VM, but I currently have 2 VMs running:

• Ethernet Servers OpenVZ $25/year for 1vCPU/100GB/3GB.
• Cloud Fanatics KVM $4.05/month for 2vCPU/60GB/2GB.

I've been tinkering and selfhosting a few applications and a subsonic music server. Works great!