One might also conclude that the hosting provider is useless.

Or the expectation that everyone take a huge cost burden to appease El Goog is a bigger burden than the startup industry realizes. There's really no solution for HTTPS that does less than double my hosting costs, either I have to buy expensive certs or move to another hosting provider which would support Let's Encrypt. Either way it's a couple hundred dollars a year to maintain hobby sites, which don't pay for themselves to begin with.

Of course, it works in Google's favor to make it unfeasible to maintain a website outside a cloud platform. It's amazing here people are so opposed to the democratization of the Internet, and so supportive of the death of it, over security provisions that will, in retrospect, be considered largely ineffective.

What are you talking about? There are plenty of low-cost VPS providers that give you full root access on which you can easily run certbot. That's what I'm doing now, and my hosting provider costs a whopping $20/year.

Say what you will, but pushing for passwords to be transmitted securely isn't Google fighting against the democratization of the Internet. They're doing that in other ways, sure, but promoting encryption isn't one of them.

Encryption could be offered without certification authorities that charge huge sums for certs. And there's a link on /new right now about Symantec which continues to reinforce how relying on CAs is a broken concept.

So, right now, I have 24/7 American-based phone support (this is a must-have), 99.9% uptime guarantee, WHM/cPanel software licensing included, 60 GB disk space, 600 GB bandwidth included. By all means, if you have a VPS service that can offer all of this at less than $30 a month, I'd love to consider it. I haven't changed hosting providers in a while, but I haven't found a company capable of meeting the requirements.

Have you thought about using that 24/7 phone support to ask them to upgrade cPanel? Since August it comes with LE support in the form of the AutoSSL plugin.

Then use one of the offline challenges.