Comment on: Time has come to switch to alt-tech web hosts please recommend options
My suggestion would probably depend on what kind of hosting you're looking for. Are you looking for someone to manage all the infrastructure for you? Or are you tech-savvy enough to do it all on your own? What kind of of tech stack(s) are you using?
1.) Nearly Free Speech is a good option, as someone else has already mentioned. The downside is that it is unmanaged. You have to do all the setup and server configuration on your own. On the plus side, it's probably the most affordable hosting service I've seen and it supports many different languages and tech stacks out of the box (including some pretty rare ones - https://indigo-cgi.nfshost.com/)). Plus you just can't beat their privacy practices.
2.) Digital Ocean - Digital Ocean is a very popular, unmanaged hosting platform. You can run an app for as low as $5/mo. I personally haven't used DO, but plenty of seasoned developers seem to love it. Some similar platforms to look at are Vultr and Linode. Again these are all unmanaged.
3.) Gandi - Gandi is another company many privacy-minded developers seem to love. Their company motto is "No Bullshit", which is refreshing. Their hosting platform is managed, meaning you have more time to code and focus on your product. Currently it looks they support PHP, Node.js, Python and Ruby.
4.) Python Anywhere - If you love Python and write your web apps in it, Python Anywhere is a managed platform specifically designed to efficiently run Python applications. From what I know, Python Anywhere isn't owned by Amazon, but their platform is built on top of AWS, if that matters to you.
5.) Heroku - Heroku is a popular hosting platform that also runs on top of AWS. Honestly, I've never been a huge fan of Heroku - they limit you to using PostgreSQL, and they charge you up the ass for anything they can get away with. Even so, I know several co-workers colleagues who love Heroku with a passion.
6.) Sourcevoid - Sourcevoid is a hosting platform that is built on top of Google's Cloud Engine, but is independently ran and owned by a cool Swedish dude. The platform supports quite a few different languages out of the box, but even if your tech stack isn't officially supported, they will help you get everything running for no extra charge. Sourcevoid tries to help automate just about everything for you, leaving more time for focusing on your code. The downside of Sourcevoid is that it can can be pretty expensive starting out.
7.) OpenShift - OpenShift is a unique hosting platform that offers fairly priced hosting. It is managed, but it can require a lot of setup to get going (at least for me, cause I'm a dumbass when it comes to infrastructure and devops-type stuff). If your app is small enough, I believe RedHat allows you host it for free, with some trade-offs.
I work in this language every day and my spirit is slowly breaking. Thankfully it's driven me to look at as many JS alternatives as humanly possible, which led me to one of my favorite languages, Elm.
There is no real reason to code in Javascript anymore. It's such an enormous pain that there are now plenty of nicer (i.e. readable, predictable, maintainable) alternatives that compile to Javascript without the hassle.
A few notables (for me) are:
You can also find a comprehensive list of alternatives here
I've read quite a few articles predicting that Javascript is "the Assembly of the web", in the sense that in the future less people will actually code in Javascript, but rather use alternate tools and languages that use Javascript as a compilation target. I hope it's true.