Re: Alternative low cost hosters?
Personally I use Digital Ocean and look after the VPS's myself. They are then backed up to an Azure storage cloud. I have a VPS with OVH that is dormant but is configured with my clients accounts, so that if DO do a Linode and go AWOL, I can restore the sites from Azure and switch domain names for prolonged downtime.
I've never had to do this though. Thankfully!