A long long time ago, I bought a domain or two, and a shared hosting plan from Dreamhost w/ unlimited bandwidth/storage. I don’t have root access, and can’t do containers on this. It’s been useful for a Piwigo instance to share scanned family photos. The problem I have is the limited resources really limit Piwigo’s ability to handle the large TIF files involved in the archival scans. There are ways around this, but they all add time to the workflow that already eats into my free time enough. I’m looking at moving Piwigo to my local server that has plenty of available resources. That leaves me with little reason to keep the Dreamhost space. So what’s a decent use case for cheap, shared hosting space anymore?
To be clear, I’m not looking for suggestions to move to a cheap VPS. I’ve looked into them, and might use one in the future, but don’t need it right now. The shared hosting costs about $10.99/month at the moment. If there was a way I could leverage the unlimited bandwidth/storage as an offsite backup, that would be amazing, but I’m not sure it would be a great idea backing up stuff to a webserver where there best security I can add it via an .htaccess file.
I did some experiments in the past. The nicer option I could find was enabling webdav API on the hosting side (it was an option on cPanel if I recall correctly, but there are likely other ways to do it). These allow using the webserver as a remote read/write filesystem. After you can use rclone to transfer files, the nice part is that rclone supports client side encryption so you don’t have to worry too much about other people accessing files.