Shared hosting is probably better, and AFAIK more common, for the mildly dynamic website. The host handles a lot of the admin tasks like OS updates that you have to handle yourself with a VPS.
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.
+1 for NearlyFreeSpeech! I’ve used them for years paying only 40-45 cents a month. I love that I can just ssh in and mess around. My site is mostly static but recently I wanted to add a private section for specific family and friends. So I implemented OAuth 2.0 login with 2 php files and an .htaccess rule.
And even more obscure languages like Forth and Octave. The only thing to watch out for is that they run FreeBSD (instead of a more "normal" distribution) so if you're used to Linux-as-seen-on-Debian-or-Ubuntu there are a few things that are different (but so cozy).
For what it's worth, FreeBSD is actually it's own thing and not Linux at all. It's descended from Berkeley Unix and has no code in common with Linux or GNU (though it can still run software that's cross-compatible).
Correct - but if you're normally interacting with Linux boxes on the command line you're probably not going to be too far from home since the _programs_ behave mostly-the-same.
This. For people looking for hosting as a service that don’t need scale (and even for some people who think they do) shared hosting is often the best low-admin + low-cost solution. Buuut you can’t brag about your cloud setup.
