Looking for cheap shared hosting suggestions

[naba_dajani]

I mostly have a hosting account for pointing domains that I use for mail, or static pages. But, I also have three very low-volume WordPress sites. So with that in mind, I'm comparing the $2.50 - $3.00/month shared space.

I had been using the $3.50 tier over on Amazon LightSail, but was kind of hoping to not be my own admin.

So far, I've tried the following:

• HostMantis - Super happy with the service and performance on the DA Advanced plan, but thought the ratejacking the day after most of the Black Friday / Cyber Monday sales ended was particularly sleazy. The response I got when I basically offered to pre-pay for a year at my current rate was met with a response that was slightly more polite than telling me to FOAD. I get it. They want out of "cheapest-you-can-get-me" hosting.
  
  
• CrocWeb - They seem like nice people. Their support was responsive. But I somehow pegged the CPU resources with just one WP site with no traffic and super basic plugins. The nominal usage -- just sitting there doing nothing -- somehow consumed 30% CPU on the Baby Croc plan.
  
  
• InterServer - They also seem quite nice, but they really limit you on I/O. Try any large-ish transfer, and everything grinds to a halt at 4 megabits. You can feel WP kind of cry, and I had to tinker with Duplicator just to keep it from timing out when making a backup.
  
  
• NameCheap - The Stellar Plus plan mostly reminds me of HostMantis in terms of performance. Everything runs great there, and I don't seem to come even close to hitting resource constraints. But something is hopelessly broken with their mail, and I can't seem to lead their support people into having someone figure out why there's a massive backlog. Their support people try, but it's kind of like live chat with retail companies, where you know the person on the other end is trying to juggle multiple customers at once. I don't really need top-tier mail, so it's one of those things where if the sites work, I'll probably just figure out something else for mail and keep the $2.50 hosting.
  

I'm hoping there may be some suggestions out there from my fellow cheapskates. Recognizing that I'm a tiny guppy in an ocean of choice, I don't think I'm looking for anything extremely out of line for the price:
Need:

• More than 20 domains
  
  
• 5 GB storage
  
  
• Enough resource headroom for 3 - 4 low-traffic and simple WP sites
  
  
• Shell access
  
  
• Basic e-mail
  

Want:

• Unlimited domains
  
  
• 10+ GB storage
  
  
• Mail that isn't constantly broken or blacklisted
  

Nice to have:

• Support response time under 24 hours
  
  
• Independent company
  
  
• Free trial / money-back guarantee