I've looked at this before, I have an OVH dedicated server (not VPS) based in france which costs me a mere £5/month and thought of running it on there, I also used to have a few vps's around the world but they were let go years ago. you used to be able to see the advertised on sites like lowendbox for $10-15/year.
I think if you want a bit of flexibility you want half a dozen people getting together, get a hand full of vps's in different locations between you and then run VPN on each of them, yes you get more control but someone needs to maintain them, make sure the VPN doesn't go down, add users etc