Eight years on Webfaction and I’m still hosting my sites with them. So yeah, Webfaction hosting doesn’t suck at all, sorry for the click bait. I only mentioned ‘Webfaction hosting still sucks’ as an inside joke within friends since we don’t really have much to complain about.
I’ve been using Webfaction on most WordPress websites that I run, those with small to medium amount traffic, and since June 10, 2009 when I first signed up with these guys, and I’ve never had any major issues with their service. Within my first 10 months of hosting with them, I wrote my first post about their service, (in 2010) which was actually nothing but a positive review, my first impressions of what they offer.
In those eight years, I can’t say I haven’t ran into serious technical issues, I did. I’ve experienced getting malware spread from an outdated plugin (possibly from another user), an editor who uploaded malware infected media, I’ve had a dev who once accidentally deleted an important app, some billing issues whenever I get late with payments (my fault entirely). But what I meant is their service is just great. I was able to sort out technical issues with relative ease and their support went beyond what other hosts support staff would do. They never gave me canned responses ever and I think I’ve never really dealt with more than five different people, unless they’ve been using the same handles, during those eight years.
And don’t get me wrong, I don’t run our entire operation on shared hosting, that would be ridiculous. Our team develops and maintains apps on Amazon EC2 and on Digital Ocean where we run production servers which I can’t afford to put on shared hosting. Small clients, friends, personal and voluntary work, they all go into my Webfaction account.
Webfaction does offer VPS as well but I’m happy running some smaller sites using their shared hosting which is a fraction of the cost of running a full fledged publication or an API on a dedicated virtual servers on the cloud. Webfaction’s shared and VPS plans work great for developers. They now also run your sites/apps on speedy SSD storage and their shared hosting is never over subscribed so you don’t get too many users running apps on the same server. This is really one of those things that sets them apart from your typical cheap shared hosting. Really, I can’t say ‘Webfaction hosting still sucks’ with a straight face, because they don’t.
Update and Disclosure: I recently gave up all my Webfaction accounts some time after the GoDaddy acquisition. Here instead is my affiliate link for Webfaction Digital Ocean.
