[proyb]

"Not everyone can afford the time, money, and effort to maintain a server."

Shared hosting doesn't need effort to maintain server and have been done for long time? There are a few free hosting.

There is a need for more than just CMS, I have been working on the new idea.

[XCSme]

I agree, many always start with the premise "hosting is hard", but maybe this was true 20 years ago, now hosting providers let you spin-up a server in a few clicks, have monitoring, alerts, automatic updates and more. The good part is that for 99.99% of the time, once you set-up a server it could keep on running without issues for many years.

I am not a sys-admin but I have used multiple hosting providers (shared, VPS, dedicated) and so far I never had a single server fail or suddenly stop working.

[proyb]

True, sadly shared hosting still limit with capped disk IO and bandwidth at a premium price which would be similar or more than competitive VPS in performance.

I'm still looking out for competitive VPS provider other than UpCloud if you have any recommendations.

[indigodaddy]

Look at BuyVM, OVH (SoYouStart/Kimsufi), Netcup.eu. All very solid providers and I have servers/VMs with all of them.

..or even Oracle Cloud Always Free Tier (which gives you 2x 1G VMs)

[XCSme]

I think that most of the VPS providers have similar prices, I personally use DigitalOcean as I really like their interface.

[proyb]

True, I have been comparing performance and long-term contract which I have research on shared hosts and VPS providers.

[Shared404]

I like Linode personally.

No BSD options, but they've got a pretty good selection of Linux distros as ready made images.

[proyb]

I have Linode years ago and moved on when the pricing and performance weren't competitive as UpCloud.

[Ir0nMan]

Same, I have been using Linode for almost 10 years for small projects.