Webhosting to be a giant mess with thousands of actors 10 years ago, you would have spend hours to find the perfect hosting company. If you did not want to go to the big guys like 1&1 or OVH and pay a three-figures bill to have basic features you really had few options…
Now, it’s over, hosting is cool again with a lot of new players in the game. I just found a new one that I have not heard of before and it look legit.
To be honest, I really did not take care of my personal hosting for the last years. Once I found a deal to get unlimited hosting for $50/year, on pronethosting, everything worked fine. At that time I only needed PHP and MySQL with FTP access to run my blog. Then they got acquired by another hosting company CoolHandle, and increased their price, to $100 a year. It was still fine with me. But recently I had couple of problem (DNS changes without notice, access to dashboard,…). After 5 years, I am ready to move and find a professional company to host my site for a decent price.
WebFaction seems to be ideal for that.
The worst you want to do with your code is to give it to an untrust person. WebFaction was created in 2003 under the name python-hosting.com, they used to host only Python applications and got quite popular in the community. They were hosting thousands of open-source python projects, and years after years kept improving their offer. They added SVN repo hosting, Django support and many other stuff.
Python-hosting is now WebFaction and they claim to host 250 000 apps, with datacenters in US, Europe and Asia. Ruby and PHP apps can now be hosted on their platform. Everything cool could be done there :)
Developers tend to wish to have control of their machine. And WebFaction team totally understood that, they come from the same world as their customers.
I used to be super lazy, and scared of SSH. At that time, I would have had prefered FTP with a visual interface over SSH in a shell. I found myself safe whenever I had to deal with cPanel dashboard instead of configuring manually each services…
Now, that I gained experience in development and ops, I definitively prefer to have control on machines.
WebFaction suits definitively this need. If you deal with cloud computing on everyday job you won’t be lost, you are surrounded by a environement you already know. It’s one of the best shared hosting provider with the last up-to-date software.
Their simple dashboard lets you setup the high-level features to manage emails, domains or databases. The rest could be done directly in a shell on a SSH session. You are the master onboard. And for only $8.50 a month, that’s the best you could expect ! Even cheaper than Amazon EC2 or Heroku !
Unfortunately I could not quit my actual hoster, until this summer. But I will definitively start my future projects on WebFaction.
If you are not confident paying without testing they even have a trial tier.
I am looking for hearing from your experience using WebFaction. Happy Coding !