I maintain a moderately complex site for a nonprofit, with an e-commerce back end and a searchable full-text database. The budget is a shoestring (there's, like, one e-commerce purchase a week) and I don't have the time to keep a server patched.
For me, the right solution is "semi-dedicated hosting" from NameCrane.com. Really it's just high quality shared hosting with resource guarantees. You can pay anywhere from eight to 120 bucks a year depending on the amount of resources you want. For me the sweet spot is $15 a month for a quarter terabyte of NVMe storage, two cores, and four gigs of RAM.
Unlike with Mythic Beasts, you don't get to run your own persistent processes; you have to be content with the mysqld and lighthttpd provided. But on the plus side, you get backups, cron jobs, and good outbound email deliverability. SSH access is available. You don't get sudo, which is kind of the point, but you can install whatever software you want, as long as you "pip install --user" and "configure --prefix $HOME". That might take some getting used to, for folks used to a VPS; but it's a worthwhile trade-off for not having to do server admin.
I'm surprised containers aren't mentioned once.
With mass virtual hosting (not virtualisation, think in terms of vhosts in Apache) resource sharing and security issues that aren't easily fixed with some UID/GID quota tricks and as such we got chrooted FTP, SSH and SCP, then OpenVZ at some point, and LXC. Later down the line we got container sand cgroups and even later, cgroupv2. All of them with similar goals in mind: shared resources, but strong enough isolation to not have unwanted side-effects.
This is still something that exists, but isn't really used this way (as far as I can tell - only ISPConfig seems to do this?), because containers were then also used as stateless packaging methods where you don't edit anything in a running container, but rather just re-deploy the whole thing. That is of course not a good match for the article, but there is nothing preventing this from being done in a container. Heck, if you have classic shared storage (i.e. NFS) you could get any container hosting company to do this without them knowing it.
But you'd still be on the hook for managing the container lifecycle...
I've yet to find anything that competes with the combination of easy to use, powerful, and affordable as a cPanel/WHM setup.
If you run a VPS for multiple websites you can use different Linux users for each site. Obviously not as secure as a container but simple and light weight.
For reference, this post prompted a lot of discussion on lobste.rs: https://lobste.rs/s/f5ziu7/comments_on_shared_unix_hosting_v...
"This site now runs on Mythic Beasts, basically because they are a Unix host, not just a PHP host.
They allow you to run persistent HTTP servers, supervised with systemd"
Systemd isn't Unix...
It's such a security nightmare it makes sense why few people do it anymore, it has nothing to do with cloud hipsters or whatever. A lot of these shared hosting companies were hacked constantly. 0-day local privilege escalation exploits aren't that difficult to find comparatively, there is a HUGE exposed surface area.
IMHO If you share computing with random other people you want AT LEAST Intel VT/AMD-V virtualization for isolation.
> I just want write some scripts and SSH to a Unix box I don't want to maintain kernels, web servers, or SSL certificates.
That's my use case too. I don't want to maintain a VPS, just have some server available. Something fast and cheap which is maintained by someone else.