I paid the extra $$ for lifetime (and did it back when I was a grad student and had basically zero money) because I didn't want to have to think about hosting any more. Now I have to think about hosting again. Ugh.
On a related note: where is good for hosting two small websites? I'd like to be able to log in with SSH and get an actual Unix shell (and not have to pay too much, as the websites are neither large nor popular).
You might be interested in prgmr.com . VPS based on Xen. The owner is also a member of HN and wrote "The Book of Xen" a couple of years ago.
Also since you mentioned UNIX, maybe arpnetworks.com . As I recall they run Linux KVM VPS but offer OpenBSD and FreeBSD if preferred over a Linux guest.
I host three sites on Linode, lowest plan at $20/mo. They're excellent, as just about everyone can tell you. It's a full install of a Linux distro of your choosing, any software you want. It's as good as having a Linux machine sitting in your office.
However, $20/mo might not be the lowest price you can find for two low-traffic sites.
edit - I should point out, I host three low traffic sites on one low-end Linode instance, so that' $20/mo flat for three sites. I also use it for compiling code (I can compile code anywhere from my phone!) and testing out new features for various bits of software, so it has more use than just hosting.
I use Linode for several low-traffic sites as well, and I'd recommend them.
However, there's one crucial aspect in which they're different than having a Linux machine sitting in your office (which I also have): for $100 I can put a 2TB drive in the local server. The equivalent space at Linode would cost $1000 a year.
If you have lots of data, Linode probably isn't a good fit. I'd look into Amazon S3 (which I suppose you could use with Linode hosting in front of it, but I'd probably just use AWS if I were relying heavily on S3).
Despite my post, I'm more into server administration than I am programming. Might be why I love Linode. I've helped a couple people set up their Linode sites, and tie it into S3 (and other services) for various uses. The thing I love most about Linode is that it's anything you want it to be.
I have a small one from them as a NS server and has no issue at all. However their bandwidth allocation (40G for 256m plan) is not enough for pretty much anything else.
If all you need is a shell plus LAMP, Dreamhost is pretty decent shared hosting. (Their Rails support apparently works, but Rails-using customers seem to have a tendency to suck up a lot of resources that other people could be using more moderately.)
As long as it's not terribly mission critical I'd suggest a VPS. Since you have a virtualized server you get everything you mentioned (and the responsibility of keeping the damn thin up to date). Take a look at http://lowendbox.com You're likely to find deals in the $20/yr range for small instances with ~128MB RAM. Expect 99% uptime and you'll be pleasantly surprised with the third nine.
If you chose a supplier at random, they yes, some of those will probably disappear after a few months. But if you spend some time digging around a little, you'll find things like "Best Provider of the Year" type posts (e.g. http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/best-low-end-providers-in-2011... ). These tend not to be fly by nighters.
Consider starting with that list, and look for recent offers by them. Also read the comments on each offer looking for irregularities. Lowendbox has a decent community, they know when an offer smells, or when a fly-by-nighter drops in. Granted it won't be perfect, but you can reduce the risk of a provider disappearing all of a sudden with a little bit of reading and digging.
Two in particular I find trustworthy: VooServers and Evorack
But beware, many low-end-box type providers use stock standard off-the-shelf tools and software, including WHM. So if you have a religious disagreement with passwords in cleartext emails, you should steer well clear of lowendbox/WHM combinations and go for a highend supplier instead.
Or perhaps a more practical method, don't use a secure password when you sign up, and make it more secure on the VM itself when you log in for the first time
I didn't end up playing with any low end VPSs because none of the providers I evaluated offer users the ability to clone VPSs, which is one of my requirements.
That's the nature of the business I'm afraid. But I have found some reliable hosts through the site and some very established hosts used to make offers before the siteowner left.
Yes, I just shamelessly put in an affiliate link, but the service really is very good. It's shared hosting but you get SSH, a smart admin panel and very reasonable prices for your memory. After a few years using it, I'm also happy to report that their technical support is excellent - timely, helpful and knowledgeable.
What I disliked about webfaction is that the connection is proxied behind an nginx. But it is true that they have an excellent support. They answer almost inmediately. Also their Q&A was migrated to a stackexchange clone.
I prefer Linode, a little more expensive but you get decide even your own distro. (Yay for Archlinux)
Webfaction is also good if you want to run a no hassle Django installation. I initially got an account when I was learning Django and there weren't many Django friendly shared hosts out there. I have kept it to this day as their hosting panel is still pretty useful. They also have a bunch of automatic installs for rails, cherrypy, pylons, pyramid, subversion and trac etc. I've since moved on to do it myself on VPS but I still think Webfaction offers something different with their "framework" application approach.
Thanks for pointing out WebFaction. Of all the mentioned solutions WebFaction seems to me to be the closest thing to the old TextDrive shared hosting. I'm getting too old to want to get my hands dirty with managing my own VPS for a few simple PHP sites, some email accounts and my subversion repositories (and I can even switch to git).
NearlyFreeSpeech is very cheap and they even give you a shell with gcc (and I've run uploaded and run Go apps). They do require the applications to be static or CGI, though.
For VPS, I recommend burst.net, specifically their XEN 1Gb ram plan. Their price structure is kinda strange, 0.5G is $7.95, 1G is $12.95, 1.5G is 24.95. So 1G plan is a no brainer. I have 2 of these, one in their PA Datacenter, the other in CA.
Just to chime in with everyone else...I'm in the same boat. VC2/3 since Sept/2005. I started with them because they were the only host to offer Rails support. Now, my most pressing need is email support--transferring the main accounts, so that gmail can POP them off the accounts.
Edit: Obviously, any serious application would have been migrated off of Joyent long ago, but many of us have several small apps (Rails, Wordpress, etc) along with email accounts. I think it's more of an issue of migrating many small apps rather than a single large app.
I've used Slicehost (now Rackspace) successfully for a couple of years, but my pricing is probably terrible now. 256MB slice for $20/mth. I have a feeling I need to re-visit this...
I really like working with Bluehost (http://www.bluehost.com/). They are amazingly cheap shared hosting plans targeted at non-administrators, but if you are willing to provide a copy of your government ID (as insurance against naughtiness) they will provide shell access. Their admins are very accommodating about letting me run my own stuff as long as it won't impact other users of the server.
Seconded. I've been using blue host for years with no troubles. Only downside is they keep lowering their rates, so I've got to call them every year or so to switch to the cheaper plan.
Regardless of where you host, if that's a problem for you, just set up a free account at Pingdom to hit it every 1 minute, and get uptime/response time monitoring as a bonus. Easy peasy.
I never asked much of it - all I really cared was that it was hosting that I didn't have to think about. Two WordPress sites, some backups of important files and the occasional scp around a stupid firewall or NAT box. And now they are canceling the lifetime service, or, put their ham-handed way: "your lifetime service will end on October 31, 2012."
Seriously. Someone in charge of PR actually wrote down and sent out an email with the sentence "your lifetime service will end on October 31, 2012."
Maybe they know something you don't know? Like perhaps they're planning on murdering you on October 30th. In that scenario, the sentence would make total sense.
Yup. Now as for damages, though, even though indeed they are supposed to cover your lost value and not the original price, the original price is going to set a point of reference that will influence how much you could reasonably convince any judge your lost value is. But say we compute it another way. Suppose you can buy equivalent service from Amazon for $100 a year forever. The net present value of that perpetuity at a 10% interest rate is $1000. You can easily see why if you imagine investing the $1000 at the 10% interest rate and using the interest each year to buy hosting: your principal would stay at $1000 forever. Now plug in numbers you actually think are feasible. And subtract attorney's fees. Good luck.
Broken promises leave a bad taste in my mouth.