I’m running a $5/month droplet with Plex. My media library is stored on Google Drive ($10/tb/month) and then mounted from Ubuntu.
All my media is in mp4 format which I don’t need to transcode on any of my devices. I has crashed a couple times when downloading multiple movies while trying to stream simultaneously. It also had a hard time scanning 850gb of media while also streaming a movie, but now that it’s finished it seems to run fine.
I may try upgrading to $10/month droplet for better stability, but I’m not sure its worth the cost. All in all I’m happy with this solution. If Plex Cloud works through some of the issues (eg. no sync feature, slow to load metadata, seems to go offline when not in use, reconnect time is slow), I will probably switch back, but for now I prefer Digital Ocean.
If you are a student you can get $50 of Digital Ocean credit here. That got me 10 free months. You could also theoretically cut cloud storage prices in half with Amazon Drive, but unfortunately they closed their API a couple years ago, and I can’t get it to work on Ubuntu.