I've worked on the support side of the hosting industry for a Long Time. A few observations.
1) Hosting is hard. It doesn't seem like it should be, but it is. cPanel simplifies and complicates it because you're locked into doing things The cPanel Way whether you like it or not.
2) Hosting is getting more expensive because cPanel keeps jacking up prices, and I strongly suspect that this host threw in the towel due to the severity of the compromise but also the razor thin margins. Digging out from under it was likely more trouble than it was worth, especially if they didn't have insurance for this kind of thing.
3) KEEP YOUR OWN BACKUPS. For the love of all data that is important, keep your own backups. Did I mention that anyone with a website on any provider on any continent should keep their own backups? By all means, keep your own backups. Because if you don't keep your own backups, you'll wish you'd kept your own backups.
To add the rest of my usual mantra: AND TEST YOUR BACKUPS.
Memories of the look on someone's face when I had to tell them that their laptop drive was truly dead (unless they wanted to pay a data recovery company a pile o' cash) and the USB stick they'd been saving copies of important documents too appeared to be silently corrupting everything written to it...
There are many. CentOS Web Panel, Virtualmin, DirectAdmin, Interworx, and many others. I use Virtualmin on my own stuff. It has a FOSS version that works well. But it's no cPanel. The interface and general paradigms leave a lot to be desired. But it works. The problem isn't variety, it's user base. All the Big Hosts are using cPanel, migrating away from it is a pain.
There's also Plesk, but let's face it. Nobody likes Plesk.
2) Hosting is getting more expensive because cPanel keeps jacking up prices, and I strongly suspect that this host threw in the towel due to the severity of the compromise but also the razor thin margins. Digging out from under it was likely more trouble than it was worth, especially if they didn't have insurance for this kind of thing.
3) KEEP YOUR OWN BACKUPS. For the love of all data that is important, keep your own backups. Did I mention that anyone with a website on any provider on any continent should keep their own backups? By all means, keep your own backups. Because if you don't keep your own backups, you'll wish you'd kept your own backups.