I’m certainly not “married” to Cpanel per se. In fact, when I saw the Unix prompt I thought I might be able to steer my website from there, doing ‘chmod’, ‘tar’, etc. on the hosted files. I still suspect that’s quite possible, but I didn’t want to learn all about ‘buckets’ and other jargon to get there.
I’m not looking for the absolutely cheapest option. I’d happily pay $100/year — in fact that’s what I was paying Lunarpages before they lowered their fee with no prompting from me. The cheapest Lunarpages comes with online chat — I’m amazed they can afford it. The minimum Amazon contract that allows chat is much more than $100 IIRC.