Amazon Lightsail now offers servers at $3.5 per month with 1 vCPU, 512MB of memory, and 1Tb of data transfer. Similar services are available at DigitalOcean. We can host personal VPN (virtual private network) servers cheaply. Docker containers enable quick configuration of these servers, even for people with little Linux experience.
As someone who uses Google search and Google Scholar dozens times a day, I am especially concerned by the blockage of Google websites for scientists in some countries.
Spot instances on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allow researchers to do high performance computing at very low cost. For example, a 64-core workstation with 256 GB of memory can be rented at about $0.7 per hour, which is ~80% off regular on-demand prices. You can request 10 of such servers and use them for 5 days and 2 hours and it only cost you a few hundred dollars.These are spare computing capacities that could be abruptly terminated.