Thanks for the help, DPRK !
I’m afraid that Amazon will not be a good fit for me. For one thing, it sounds like little experiments could end up as new charges on my credit card — quite different from a host like Lunarpages where the fee is exactly $X, period. And, although my website is 99.99% static I like to dabble with server-side scripts, just for fun. And I have read-protected directories and other things that Amazon S3 doesn’t seem to like.
Especially important to me is the ability to inflate tarballs. (Rightly or wrongly my site has a preposterously large number of pages!) It seems that Amazon has some “Uploading Objects Using Multipart Upload API.” I don’t want Blah-blah-blah. I want tar xzf. Good old 45-year old tar xzf.
Given the stupid questions I ask, it’s even hard for me to believe that I was once a Unix kernel guru. Certainly I know that ‘cp foo bar’ overwrites the old version of ‘bar’ if any; and so does Cpanel. Amazon S3, I read, keeps old versions of ‘bar.’ A few slip-ups from me and I might end up with wasted gigabytes I don’t know about but am paying for!
I think this old-fogey had better stick to Cpanel.