Comments on: WebFaction is great

By: Alice Bevan-McGregor

Alice Bevan-McGregor — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 23:22:53 +0000

Initially I had a wonderful experience with WebFaction, first hosting my personal site and projects, and eventually convincing the organization I work for to migrate to them from several poorly self-managed VPS servers. Over the years I have convinced a number of friends to host there, and they have all been very happy. Unfortunately, we (the company I work for) ran into a bit of a problem with one of our managed dedicated servers and have since migrated all of our clients to Amazon EC2 and written our own load-balancing hosting platform.

A few minutes later I had a response indicating that Webfaction had likewise noticed a watchdog failure and had asked the data center to reboot the host. Cool. An hour of downtime, tops, I can deal with. But then they couldn't physically locate the server, and the week went down hill from there.

E-mail services have been the only massive headache I have experienced thus far (with a minor hiccup in the use by default of ext3 instead of a more sane filesystem). From the look of WebFaction's status blog, with unexpected downtime on 23 servers (some in batches) since Aug. 1st, they (and their clients) haven't been having an easy time of it.

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 15:15:49 +0000

I host the majority of my stuff on WebFaction, and have for the last 9 months or so. Awesome company.

Not sure what ‘awake’ is talking about saying that they’re ‘kind of slow compared to godaddy’ – not sure what server you’re on or what you’ve been smoking but the speed is nearly comparable to a VPS or dedicated server and their hosting is clustered – GoDaddy is not.

GoDaddy is cheap, bullshit, packed-sardine hostings (throw as many customers on a single box as possible). When I did a lookup on a friend’s box who was with GoDaddy they had over 900 domains hosted on the same server (possibly more as this was just 1 IP I was looking at).

I have yet to find anyone else as good as WebFaction in the shared hosting arena – and I am so happy with their custom control panel. I cannot stand cPanel anymore. I’ll take plain ssh access over cPanel any day.

By: Brandon

Brandon — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 15:13:02 +0000

Web Faction is the single best hosting provider I’ve ever used. Their customer service has bent over backwards to help me, and their control panel is simply outstanding. I can have a Django site up and running in minutes. I recommend them to all of my freelance clients.

By: Pete

Pete — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 15:07:33 +0000

@Frank

By: awake

awake — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:08:52 +0000

webfaction rocks but they are kind of slow compared to godaddy.

They don’t give as much space either which kind of sucks.

Other than that… for power users, they have one of the best shared environments.

By: Frank

Frank — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:04:26 +0000

Webfaction is really good. I got even more than I expected. No bloody Apache, Nginx instead. Very awesome.

P.S. Pete has hidden an affiliate link in his comment. Sneaky Pete.

By: Kristian

Kristian — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:01:11 +0000

Webfaction is the best shared hosting provider I have come across so far. A lot of configuration possibilities, good tutorials, and you can even have your own SVN repositories

By: Pete

Pete — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:54:50 +0000

I had a similar experience and have so far found Webfaction amazing. Just today a client wanted to be able to email a document to an address so it would be imported into the site, with previous hosting companies this would have left me scratching my head - with Webfaction, no problem: https://help.webfaction.com/136 I'd too recommend Webfaction!