No worries! If you really want to save money take a look at the cloud formation (AWS) implementation of it. It would take some trial and error to find the parameters to best suit you and friends, but it uses spot pricing to take advantage of the cheapest hardware possible. It’s linked in the docs (but I always have to dig for it), so direct link is here https://github.com/vatertime/minecraft-spot-pricing
I’ll add - I struggled to find a cloud host that was actually competitive compared to game hosting companies. I went through a few before I settled on one that was so cheap I just couldn’t get close with running my own. My friends like to play with a lot of mods so we needed a decent chunk of RAM.
The only way I would get it to be viable from a financial standpoint was with cloud formation. I played around with it a bit but never ended up deploying - as I say - the host I settled on was so cheap it was just easier long term.