Preferably, something with free(mium) tier would be an excellent choice for those starting to self host, just to get the feel of it. If it’s not applicable, what would be the next best paid option?
This is the best one I know:
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This is a new one but the dev is committed to privacy and aligned with our goals I think. Plus they’re very responsive to feedback:
Don’t need any data to sign up just a randomly generated account number or passkey, and deleting your account is easy and happens automatically after 24 hours with no active subscriptions.
ServesGuru is affordable, unlimited bandwidth, not KYC, accepys Monero for payment, has a onion page, and has excellent customer service.
Clear net: Servers.Guru - Customer panel
Onion site: http://mysguru5rigppyihrnsejsa2wb3vv35wlzvx5u7bahw2uld3rxycphqd.onion/
The domain names seem very overpriced. .net and .org can be bought from Cloudflare for less than $10/year. More exotic tlds are surprisingly even more expensive while being less useful (they tend to be treated suspiciously by spam blacklists). In theory, you need to provide genuine contact details, but this is not enforced by ID.
There are reasons other than just cost for why you use a privacy forward VPS provider. Buying from Cloudflare cannot be as private as other options mentioned here.
Quite a few questions like that are already on the forum, one being posted less than a month ago.
Please give the search a try next time. 
I would like to ask some clarification on the matter. Using a VPS service is basically renting a machine that stays online for hosting your services, right?
My main questions about it would be
- Even from privacy-respecting providers, in theory they could always see what you put or run in these machines, right?
- How does this correlate to domain registration?
Yes
You have some specific tech and claims but overall you won’t be 100% sure indeed.
- How does this correlate to domain registration?
Some of them do offer both a VPS and a domain at the same time but you can definitely buy them independently, the 2 things doesn’t need to be paired. 
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What are those tech and claims? Anywhere I can read about them?
TEEs are quite popular especially amongst AI service providers.
Otherwise, each VPS provider probably wrote some article about how trustworthy they are at some point, give the one you’re specifically interested a search engine search. 
I don’t know what TEE’s mean. Upon giving it a search, I’ve come up with Trusted Execution Environments. Is that it? I don’t really buy the “trust me bro” agendas that providers can come up with. If I host an application that doesn’t encrypt its data like most RSS services, it would be the same as using any other non-encrypted app hosted by some other company. Maybe if that’s the case, offline P2P services would be the way to go.
If you hover over my abbreviation, this is what it will lead to indeed.
Same. Solution: self-hosting.
Hovering wasn’t working for me at all. But I will search on the matter.
I guess that would be the solution, yes.
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Learning to effectively self-host is pretty fantastic. Things like Audiobookshelf, Vaultwarden, Immich, Radicale—all pretty easy to self-host, and can help ensure you keep your data in your own possession.
Just make sure you do research into effective backup strategies. You will make mistakes, and you do not want those mistakes to result in losing important data!
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This is the one I know of www.incognet.io
Hosting provders have an EULA agreement that typically doesn’t state that a provider will examine your VPS contents unless we’re talking about Hetzner. No provider has invested into large scale mass surveillance programs on their customers to my knowledge.
The kind of risks people typically mean are multitenancy and evil technicians.
Large cloud providers like Amazon, GCP, Google do provide VPSes with hyperthreading disabled and pin VMs to a core (not with all plans, Amazon offers cheaper solutions with HT) and are crystal clear about their security practices. Infra is provisioned automatically and no technician could ssh or VNC into a customer’s machine to “debug performance of a node”.
Meanwhile your typical $3 VPS runs on Proxmox/xcp-ng and has multitenancy issues with shared networking, core pinning, EOL Xeons with spectre mitigations off not to mention bad security practices and an overall bad company culture around this topic.
Serious providers care about security a lot. While some providers survive on a margin, Amazon has insane budgets and can hire amazing engineers that do care and produce things like firecracker.
You have nothing to worry about if you’re not an APT. Cloud providers would examine contents of your machine only on court order/clear red flag leading the internal team to believe you’re doing nefarious things.
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Unrelated note, but i find it funny to see cloudflare being more resilient to the attacks on the freedom of speech in case of Kiwifarms while the self proclaimed freedom of speech and secure hosting/DNS providers have repeatedly deplatformed paying customers (breaking EULA in some cases). Most of them weren’t even as toxic as Kiwifarms and would be considered mainstream.
People interested in privacy and security, but especially activists should really stop paying money to grifters. Cloudflare and Amazon are historically better at security and are more indiffert to the paying customer than njalla, 1984 and so on. The evilmegacorps narrative just doesn’t apply here.
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