No less than 250 nodes are virtual servers from Amazon, Microsoft, Digital Ocean, etc. Seems like almost every company that offers free trials has at least a handful of Bitcoin XT servers.
This data is meaningless if you don't compare it against the stats of nodes running Bitcoin Core. Even with that, your conclusion seems to be silly: The fact that a node runs on a VPS does in no way indicate that the respective node has been obtained for free and for the sole purpose of increasing node count.
Apart from your shoddy reasoning, you ignore the fact that cloud-based infrastructure is just a very normal fact of today's businesses. Also, only a very small percentage of cloud servers have been obtained for free, for most of them clients are paying real money (else the providers would go under, no?) We certainly run all of our infrastructure on cloud-based systems, and we pay thousands of $ per month for that. And yes, we are running bitcoin nodes on these servers.
Additionally, I doubt that the servers that you can get for free are even capable of running a node due to their limited resources (although I am not sure whether this is true for all providers).
