Multi-domain Budget Shared Hosting Recommendations in 2022

salian

Disciple
I need some recommendations for a budget shared hosting provider.

I've been with Dreamhost since 2006, and am paying $190.80 every two years ($7.95/mo), grandfathered into their "Crazy Domain Insane" plan which is "unlimited".
My side projects and bots and things hosted for others go here. (High-traffic or serious sites go on AWS.)

To give an idea of my usage needs – on this plan I have around ~144 domains hosted or parked, over time. Most are Wordpress, a few are Flask, Mediawiki, or custom PHP stuff. I use 87 email accounts and 135 mysql databases.

Due to Dreamhost's add-on billing after they shifted a large database of mine to a VPS, and additional charges on support for older PHP versions, the annual bill has virtually trebled for me this year. So I'm wondering if it's time to prune things a bit and explore switching to another host.

My requirements are:
  • Unlimited or at least 100 domains hosted, parked or DNS-only.
  • Ability to have a similar amount of MySQL databases, most tiny WP but some of which might be large (~3GB)
  • Decent performance and loading times on Wordpress
  • One-click Cloudflare & LetsEncrypt integration would be a plus
  • At least 5 email addresses, if not unlimited, on each domain
  • Shell and SFTP access
  • Apart from the PHP-MySQL stack, support for Django/Flask is a must, Node.js would be a plus
  • Reasonably decent uptime (~99% or above), nothing mission critical
  • Good communication on downtime
  • Support for cron jobs at least 12 times an hour (short, non-cpu-intensive network checks)
  • Support for long-running tasks would be useful
  • Two-factor authentication on login would be good
  • Support for older versions of PHP at no extra cost would be great
  • Ability to choose between US and India servers for any website on the same account would be an amazing plus
  • Ability to migrate email accounts from a backup would be interesting
I've looked closer at Hostinger & Bluehost, and I'm open to other hosts as well. Would like to hear from actual users about any gotchas before getting a three year plan and migrating stuff.

Lastly, I'm locked-in to my current price at Dreamhost and they do renew at the same price ($190 for two years), but it seems these days on most hosts you only get the discounted price for the first bill cycle (3 years or 2 years whatever) and renewals are done at a much higher rate as they feel you are locked-in and switching will be a pain?
 
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