NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is good for this. Their main tier - "production" sites - are very inexpensive and the admins take care of OS and server-software updates. They have another tier - "non-production" sites - that are even cheaper and can be perfectly sufficient for a personal homepage. The admins maintain these servers as well but they might do beta testing on them.

The environment is fully hackable and has PHP, SSH, SFTP, MariaDB, dominant languages like Perl and Python, obscure languages like Haskell and Lisp, etc etc.