Hetzner can be a bit of a pain if you wanted to add your own DNS zone records (through their services since it's pretty much an editable text area lol), so I opted to use CloudFlare to manage that instead. I mean yeah their servers are far away from the USA but you can't beat 4.15 € ($4.52 USD) for double the specs and 19x traffic over DO and their $5 USD plan. It just comes down to needs/preference really. I forgot how @datitisev and myself came about finding Hetzner but I believe he told me about it first when were looking for alternative VPS providers.
As far as SSL is concerned, I found that CertBot more than takes care of that madness (free certs, whoosh!).
Also, since Flarum is so light, the only thing you really have to be concerned about is RAM because lets face it, Composer is a RAM hogger 😛 If you manage to update to Composer v2 though... installing and updating packages is much smoother, but RAM requirements are still the same. Any VPS with 2GB RAM or more will more than be enough to run a clean Flarum install without having to go down the memory swapping route. There's also add-on storage if you feel you need more of that (I never needed more than what was given to me).
Edit: But when it came to just seeing if Flarum can be managed on Shared Hosting, Namecheap gets the job done since they give you Composer out the bat and SSH access. Not to mention CPanel so you can manage multiple domains and even a WP install.
As I said before, it comes down to needs and preferences and with Flarum being so light, a lot of those needs can be met with a VPS of 2 GB RAM or more.
