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That page com-vs-org has a link to dreamhost. I also have a dreamhost shell account and it is pretty useful. I am responding to you right now using that account (acting like a VPN). No problem at a crappy public wifi or having my employer see any of this material. It is all hidden because I ssh to dreamhost and then use Lynx to come to FR.

What happens with dreamhost is you get a shell to SSH into. That means you are one of 100 or more users on a large linux server. You have a user account which means you read and write your own files and cannot see anyone else's or any system files. Nor can anyone muck with your files except deamhost staff. Some sketchy people have hosted on dreamhost and dreamhost did their best to protect them from DDOS. So they are not bad IMO.

But you will have to get used to doing everything at a command prompt. You will type ls and see your files. Type mv to move or rename. Then go to the dreamhost control panel in your browser to do some other admin. But you will create files on your local windows computer (or better yet a mac), then sftp those files to your dreamhost account. Then ssh to the dreamhost account to do a little mv, ls and light editing (text only, not graphical). On a mac that means simply open a shell and type ssh or sftp (or scp which is very similar to sftp). On Windows you have to install that stuff. When I type "which ssh" into my Windows bash terminal (you will have to install that too), I see /c/Program Files/OpenSSH/bin/ssh.exe That means I installed that program and it lets me access my dreamhost shell account.

If you don't think that will work for you, no need to explain further. But if you can manage that, then you will probably succeed over time with a shell account. It's $5/month or $2.59 if you pay for three years at one time. The Digital Ocean server would be $5/month but you would have to install everything yourself. E.g. lookup "Install LAMP on Ubuntu and Linux Mint" and see what you think of that complexity. But in that case you would have the server to yourself, no other grubby users on it.