Well, after playing around with my nearlyfreespeech.net account, I've crossed them off the list. Their pricing model is fantastic, but the features just aren't there. They have significant restrictions on what you can do with the shell account, everything must run in PHP's "Safe mode" so things like Gallery are right out, and they state that the ssh account should only be used for things directly relate to the hosted sites, so it would seem rsync backup would be frowned upon and eventually lead to a nastygram.

It's a shame, because I really like their philosophy and business model. I just wish they had another higher pricing tier that gave you legitimate ssh access and less restricted PHP hosting.