I do have shell access at HostGator, but when I got it there was a $5 charge (perhaps they waive that now?). I was imprecise in my wording; when I said "shell,"

I do have shell access at HostGator, but when I got it there was a $5 charge (perhaps they waive that now?). I was imprecise in my wording; when I said "shell," I really was thinking "root." Certainly, if there are things you want to do for your blog using shell, HostGator is an option. Their $75/mo single-core DediKiddies seemed less desirable to me than an arbitrarily resizable VPS with 4 virtual cores (which MT and Linode have). Also, it's too late for me to edit my original comment, but HostGator did not have VPS when I left them.