Not looking to spend a lot initially, I just want to test out this tool first.

Any recommendations/suggestions on a VPS?

I’ve got one with pritell.com. $12pcm, they’ll install a 180 day trial of MS Server ’08 for you, mine is the 1GB RAM version and a little laggy, XP runs fine on it, but despite having legit keys for the OS, their setup/.iso never accepted it so am using the server trial.