Yeah, as I said they do it to bind customers. Make you basically dedicated to their service so that in the end it is hard and a lot of effort for you to switch and so you stick with their services. That's a common marketing strategy. Nothing new.
In any case they do this, which is with a lot of contracts, just ignore the cheaper or free months and only look at the actual price. That's what's gonna matter in the end. Those few free/cheaper months won't make a difference in the long run. That's why they do it.
We have multiple servers rented there. Separating database, monitoring, main system, and so on.
I do not have any experience with their VPS though because all of our servers are root-servers since we actually need a lot of resources.
Our services don't provide an OT, so I cannot compare it that easily, especially since we also did a lot of optimization OTServers don't have.
But the VPS 4000 G9 is, if you rent it monthly, barely cheaper than the RS 4000 G9, which has just slightly worse specs.
Those machines might be a bit strong for your requirements though.
You can always migrate to a stronger server later on.
The nice thing about virtual machines is that you can usually upgrade pretty easily. It is just changing some numbers, as long as the space is available, and a machine restart and tadaaaa you got more resources. And they often times provide that service for upgrading because then you pay more money
About Cloudflare:
The thing about Cloudflare is that they are a great service to protect your web services. But
to my knowledge, they only support the hyper-text-transfer-protocol (HTTP). They do not support any form of UDP, only TCP and only HTTP. So that wouldn't help you much except with the website. So it would stop dumb kids, but not people who actually know what they are doing. Which is why the bigger servers usually have their own protection set up. You can find how modern ways to do this work by googling ^^
