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Hostgator shared accounts actually do have shell access, you just have to ask for it. Go into the live chat and ask a rep and they'll activate it for ya. They also have cheap dedicated servers called "unmanaged servers", they're kind of an unpublicized deal, its $75/mo for your own box, which I think has a 2.4 P4 and 1gb RAM, 5 IPs.

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I do have shell access at HostGator, but when I got it there was a $5 charge (perhaps they waive that now?). I was imprecise in my wording; when I said "shell," I really was thinking "root." Certainly, if there are things you want to do for your blog using shell, HostGator is an option.

Their $75/mo single-core DediKiddies seemed less desirable to me than an arbitrarily resizable VPS with 4 virtual cores (which MT and Linode have).

Also, it's too late for me to edit my original comment, but HostGator did not have VPS when I left them.

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