The Core

I got the dreaded EOL notice from my host and I'll soon need to be moving about a dozen domains. So I'm looking around to see what's out there for cheaper hosting.

The traffic is low enough that I can't justify a big spend.

Any recommendations? What questions should I be asking?

I would second Siteground. I only manage a single site (actually single account, two sites, one on Drupal, one on Wordpress) at Siteground, but they've been good.

I used to be a fan of Webfaction, but would now go for Siteground. It's more standard components. I would call both developer friendly (e.g. have git and other basic dev tools even on the cheapest shared accounts).

And I'm still a Linode fan if you want roll your own VPS.

Digital Ocean

Knownhost has been the best hosting company I've ever used, and that's saying a lot. (Probably 40-45 hosts over 20+ years.) If you need a managed server or vps, I wouldn't go elsewhere.

PAC web hosting, UK, lightspeed hosting, fast, cheap, great uptime.

I don't doubt that they had some bots running on their system. They sell server space after all. You can put anything you want on their machines, including bots and vulnerable software.

Linode was also targeted for some big DDOS attacks.

Starting Christmas Day 2015 and continuing until January 10th, Linode was hit by large and frequent DDoS attacks, which were being caused by a "bad actor" purchasing large amounts of botnet capacity in an attempt to significantly damage Linode's business.[22] Linode was the victim of another severe DDoS attack over the 2016 Labor Day weekend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linode

I think that in general they have responded well to these incidents (e.g enforcing two-factor auth after a compromise in 2013).

ditching c-panel and replacing it

Seems lots of hosts will be doing this as cpanel have drastically changed their pricing structure. Noticed it on even cheaper hosts, their hosting pricing structure is simply unsustainable when offering cpanel at their new pricing.

I do have a PHP backend for cpanel automation, without the hassle of logging in. Pretty trivial and you can see how easily it'd work using the browser console in cpanel, as they pretty much have  API-like endpoint s anyways.

DirectAdmin has a similar layout and I see a lot of lower budget hosts aiming to use them now.

Softalicious is decent enough packaged within cpanel but it can be replaced easy enough bash script by bash script with whatever software is needed.

Think cpanel really grabbed the market by the chuckies knowing it's less than trivial for hosts to change without significant hassle on their part + ~20 years of customers growing familiar with it as part of their setup and expecting it.

Interesting. I only manage one site on Siteground and since setting it up two years, I've only logged into the bash shell. So I honestly wouldn't know.

I was helping a friend with a site on Webfaction, which has their own dashboard and it is beyond confusing. Major hassle just to get a Let's Encrypt cert on there that would work with the www to non-www redirect.

My personal stuff is all on a VPS where I installed Webmin/Virtualmin. For me it's as good or better than CPanel, but I've never used Sofatlicious (you mean Softaculus?). I used a similar thing way, way back and it had a habit of installing things in ways that I didn't like, so I stopped using those installers and never tried again to see if they had gotten better. I've probably wasted a lot of time doing things manually, but I don't launch new sites very often, so it's not a pain point.