recommended cheap no-frills hosting
 

Looking to switch to different hosting service. Any suggestions as to cheap no-frills hosting on a linux server?

I need: basic functionality like php, sql, etc.
Don't need: cloud, web-building templates, 24/7 tech support, seo, e-marketing, wordpress or other apps.
Specifically don't want paternalistic 'assistance' in the form of messing with my file permissions, .htaccess, etc. Much rather deal with a small company and a lazy staff that just keeps the server up and running but mostly keeps their hands off my area.

Thanks.

nearlyfreespeech.net

digitalocean.com inexpensive VM that you can put whatever software you want on https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/#droplet

(not affliated with DO but I do use them for some of my VMs)

I just gave up my hosting contract with a rather big, but friendly commercial company and redirect my domain now to a French associative ISP, instead: Lautre.net, mostly for the nice configuration interface and the way that mutual support is given precedence over full-time service.

You did not say “American hosting service, of course”. ;)

This is what I use for various things.

https://bizland.com

Am quite attracted to this hosting service, but am hesitant about one point:

Their server appears to run FreeBSD, and my site in several places needs to run linux binary executables as cgi-bin processes. Perhaps this calls for a new (programming) thread, but would you know whether most FreeBSD servers are configured by default to execute linux binaries?

I asked support.nearlyfreespeech.net this question, and received a slightly ambiguous answer that it should be possible but "might require very careful realm selection and/or compiling the binary from source in our environment", which makes me quite hesitant. I have absolutely no experience with FreeBSD, have no clue what "realm selection" means and don't like the idea of having to compile my source code on the remote server, especially since it contains some GCC Assembly code in critical places.

You might take a look at Bemus Hosting: http://bemushosting.com/website-hosting/

I've not used the service, but I know Tony Bemus as one of the hosts of the Sunday Morning Linux Review. I've listened to that podcast for years and he seems to be a genuinely good guy.

I use ramnode and have had 0 complaints. They are very much unmanaged but skilled when asked for specific things.

http://ramnode.com/

A ticket I had awhile back, I needed to get sshfs working but I had misconfigured my server (somehow) that led to it not booting well.
Reading from bottom -> up, you can see they addressed my issue quickly, but don't provide 1-1 assistance for debugging.
This is perfect for unmanaged. Their response time has been about ~15min

Update: Decided last year to go with Dugan's advice, and built my small site on nearlyfreespeech.net, even though i had to recompile my binaries as bsd.

For a short while i was quite content, but they soon started changing several policies and are no longer much different than other hosting services, imho. So am probably back to the top of this thread once again, and may look at some of the other suggestions.

What is "cheap" to you?

$U 50 / year

Have heard a lot about digitalocean, will probably upgrade to it this year.

digitalocean is my recommendation too, though I don't use them currently and at the moment can't seem to recall who is hosting my site. that's a little worrisome.

LOL. I'm pretty sure it's not me. And I'm not cheap enough for the OP.
whois <yourdomain.com> will reveal the authoritative DNS.
dig <yourdomain.com> any will report the hosting IP address(es)
whois <IP address> will tell you the owner of the IP. That's your host.

can you clarify?
i always held a good opinion of them.
what policies? pricing? did they raise prices? or something else?