I posted some time ago asking for opinions on freeshell.org's service. Well, the subject says it all really. I paid the $36 donation for ARPA membership, and I'm very pleased.
They don't actually run Linux - they tried it but moved to Alphas for stability. They do have about 22000 users, so that's understandable I think. As they say, consumer grade hardware just isn't up to that.
They provide PHP/Perl/CGI facilities, 100MB each for mail/web/home and SSH/SCP/SFTP. So I'm happy.
Alexis