you could probably find cheaper with more to do more
I see you mentioned the free Oracle cloud servers, they are not simple to use like many cloud VPS. But if you wanted to go down that route then if you get a full account with a CC on file then you can normally get the ampere instance (still free)
I say go with proxmox on the n100 (I use it), there are alternatives kvm/QEMU managers that I heard good things about as well (namely Incus https://github.com/lxc/incus )