I am looking for advices on linux web hosting. I 've outgrown the simple hosting service I've been using as it does not provide root access on its Debian Server which I am wanting for my next Drupal project

We've been doing some storage stuff on AWS S3 buckets and have expermented with EC instances on AWS. I find some technical issues with some of the AWS EC instances that I think i might solve easily in Slackware.

I'm in China so I have to accept some issues. AWS-Hongkong has strong simple service and is friendly but has no slackware instances although they do now offer OpenSuse. DigOcean has intelligent services but they are blocked in China. Linode is not friendly to doing business here. GoDaddy is gone in China. Aliyun wants to be highly invasive of my personal space and info. Aws is just right business-wise; but I tried an AWS/ Bitnami debian Drupal package that is functional but it is deliberately crippled and does not permit updates and I envision a short relationship with Bitnami. I found function problems with AWS ubuntu and Drupal that i could not fix.

AlienBob suggested a complex method shoehorning Slackware into a linux instance that i have not tried.
What I want is a no-nonsense LAMP stack for Drupal. Slackware seems like no-nonsense to me.
Any other Slackware based hosting I could try?

Do AWS offer "Amazon Linux 2022" in that territory?

We use "Amazon Linux 2" for a lot of our EC2 instances, it's Fedora based and we've found it pretty bullet-proof for AWS use.

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It's fairly easy to create your own Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for the EC2 service, which can be any distribution you want - you just need to make sure the configuration is there for the EC2 boot process.

You can create the image, upload it into your own S3 bucket and boot it from there. Once it's booted, you can migrate the machine to EBS for persistent storage if you need that.

You don't need to shoehorn anything - just create your custom AMI and boot that

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We know how to host a simple website from inside an S3 and make it visible publically but I dont know how to execute an custom AMI from S3 and call it up to boot. But that would be the "cat's pajamas" it seems.

I am looking at the EC2 image builder now.

I've been using linode for years now. Better than anything else I've used and they have a slackware instance you can install.

You do need to know what you're doing since the install is bare bones. Their tech support is pretty good. But they don't tolerate newbies very well. They aren't going to walk you through a full setup. Their docs are pretty nice too.

I've got one $5 a month setup for testing that is nice. And you can add more memory/disk to an existing setup if you like it.

And I run a production server on another instance for 40 a month that has plenty of memory and disk space for what I do.

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I developed a process to do a custom Slackware install onto a Linode VM as I found their image to be a little too full on.

You can find the details here: https://slackware.uk/~tadgy/linode/

HTH

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Linode says:
I hear that linode is good. But they are not "China friendly" and want to treat me badly from the get-go. It's easy and convenient to work with aws -AsiaPacific- Hong Kong. So an AWS customerized instance like tadgy suggests looks very attractive.

i have a vps with slackware 14.2 on mvps.net it cheap and they have a console for the VM so you can install any iso you want it.

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I am not a fan of google, but they too have cloud virtul private servers that allow for a custom Image, so you can run your custom slackware image on their services. Google's service was super fast and reliable, but after dealing with their billing department, I felt that it wasn't very friendly to anybody, especially me, and I switched providers. Still might google be an option, though, in places like China where Linode is not an option. I'm not a fan of Amazon either, and don't know which is the lesser evil.

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I was able to get a ubuntu instance from HostHatch in HK and i installed Slackware64-current over it with their iso tool after formatting the virtual disk with the gparted iso they provide. I installed grub as a bootloader, turned on apache in the setup and voila, a Slackware web server. Slick as a mole and very very cool and useful!

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Actually I am very impressed by how much better Slackware is as a hosting server platform! It's very nice.