Yeah, you will not find a more affordable VPS that can come anywhere near the services Akka is offering. And, if you get someone else to host it for you for free, there is a high chance that they could decide they don't want to do it anymore, or somehow mess up their server and you could lose everything.
I use Akka's hosting and have for quite a while now. I used to run my server from my house, and I have put a ton of time into it, so it took me a while to even consider letting someone else host it. But, since I switched to using Akka's hosting, those concerns have gone away. His service is always available if any issues arise and the hardware and connection are extremely stable and reliable.
You probably couldn't even find professional hosting for a server for less than $100 unless it was extremely crappy. And even in the $100 range, you would still mostly be getting bad stats on the server and connection. Granted, it doesn't take a ton to run an EQEmu server, but decent upload bandwidth helps, especially as you get more players. Also, you don't want bandwidth caps unless they are maybe in the 1 terabyte per month range. With about 100 players on the server average, you will easily break 250GBs in upload bandwidth per month.
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