Still, at $20/month I use a small $100 plug computer (such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug) as a home server instead. Your use case may be different to mine but that is more than I'm willing to pay within a student budget.
I don't think those are private servers, and they are fairly poor on the storage/$ scale. But $25/year is a lower entry point then most, and if it is enough then good.
That's yet another overselling shared host running cPanel. Pretty much the stark opposite of what this article is talking about.
Oh, I'm not in any way suggesting that this is what the article is talking about. I'm specifically curious about how cheap shared hosting delivers (or fails to deliver) in a price / performance comparison to one of those "plug on the wall" servers. Not trying to be snarky here; I'm actually hoping for a legitimate response, as I have no experience with them (but they sound kind of interesting).