Except for video transcoding, a PeerTube instance is not CPU bound. Neither Nginx, PeerTube itself, PostgreSQL nor Redis require a lot of computing power. If it were only for those, one could easily get by with just one thread/vCPU.
You will hugely benefit from at least a second thread though, because of transcoding. Transcoding is very cpu intensive. It serves two purposes on a PeerTube instance: it ensures all videos can be played optimally in the web interface, and it generates different resolutions for the same video. PeerTube support for offloading transcoding to other machines is <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/947">being discussed</a>, but not yet implemented.
It's best to contact and talk directly with hosting providers, to understand their business model, vision, etc. Because only you can determine what makes you trust such or such host, and thus entrust your videos to them.
1/2 GB of RAM should be plenty for a basic PeerTube instance, which usually takes at most 150 MB in RAM. The only reason you might want more would be if you colocate your Redis or PostgreSQL services on a non-SSD system.
In early August we finalized the work on the moderation tools: accounts and comments reporting, improving the administration and moderation interface, reporting logs, messages between the moderation team and the reporter…
There are two important angles to storage: disk space usage and sustained read speed. To make a rough estimate of your disk space usage requirements, you want to know the answer to three questions:
In early june, we released PeerTube 2.2 and less than two months later we are releasing this 2.3 version. We are proud to move forward so fast on PeerTube development! As we continue to follow <a target="_blank" href="https://joinpeertube.org/en_US/roadmap">our roadmap</a>, this release incorporates the features we told you about in the latest news. Let's look around and see what it brings us...