Web hosting, but good | Hacker News Reader

Web hosting, but good

grobmeier.de

33 pointsgrobmeier36 comments

As shared hosting go, I think webfaction is second to none. They really manage to hit this sweet-spot between VPS and shared hosting, and you get the best of both worlds.

You get lots of stuff out of the box with an easy web-based interface[1], but if you really need some specific version or a package, you can do it too. Their support is fast and responsive and very helpful. They have servers in the US, Amsterdam and Singapore, and you can choose. You can even set up a fail-over server[2] quite easily.

I know I sound like a fanboy, but I truly like their service. Of course, for most of my stuff, I still use Linode/AWS, but can't recommend webfaction enough for shared hosting.

[1] e.g. you can choose the PHP version for your app from their web management console, as well as lots of predefined app templates (django, wordpress, RoR and more)

[2]http://blog.gingerlime.com/2012/webfaction-fail-over/ - a blog post I wrote about it.

Interesting - is webfaction doing some kind of Linux containers thing?

They use cgroups:

http://blog.webfaction.com/2011/11/fair-shared-hosting/

If anyone is looking for static file hosting, PHP or CGI, I strongly recommend NearlyFreeSpeech.net - I've been using them again recently and they're fantastic as ever (and incredibly cheap too, though less so if your site gets constant heavy traffic).

It should be noted that they give you SSH access and freedom to upload your own binaries. They run FreeBSD, so you might have to cross-compile, but I've ran Golang CGI servers without any issues.

I'm quite happy with them as well. For a static site without big media files it's almost free: hosting http://www.kmjn.org/ there costs me an average of $0.50/mo ($0.10 storage, $0.40 bandwidth).

Having ssh access and quite a bit of tech freedom, for either CGI stuff or just manually run command-line processing, is also quite nice. And although not everyone likes it, I like their idiosyncratic custom web admin panel.

I used to use them for everything but seems like there are always little bugs or weird configurations to deal with.

Still the cheapest and my own site is there (I'm too busy with other things to move it), but no longer my favorite.

Yeah..that's the first webhost the bullet points on the article reminded me off. Pay what you use, and great support.

Just keep in mind that their hosting service is targeted towards people who know what they are doing, and they do not allow third parties to access your account, and they are very serious about this.

If you share your login information with anyone for any reason at all, and they find out about it, they will disable your account.

We've had to rescue a couple of NFS.net users that have made a mess of things one way or another. Getting NFS.net users sorted out is a very-not-fun game of cat & mouse with NFS.net support. This isn't really a criticism of them though -- I like NFS.net overall -- just something that potential customers need to be aware of.

edit: went back through my email so that I could provide a more specific example. Owner of a small board game business had a website developed by his technical partner; technical partner hosted it with NFS.net and then became completely unavailable later on; website was then compromised and used for SEO spam (probably stolen FTP credentials / bruteforced lame password); business owner saw his website disappear altogether from Google listings with no idea of what was going on. He became our client at that point. While this was happening, his NFS.net-registered domain also expired, and the email address associated with his NFS.net account was at his domain (!). NFS.net support flatly refused to respond to any matters regarding his account from any email address other than the one at his expired domain, which couldn't be resolved until account access was restored, which was impossible as long as the domain was expired ...

Unfortunately, I don't have notes on how that particular one was resolved, but there are a bunch of domain transfer notifications shortly after -- I suspect we weren't able to ever resolve the trouble with NFS.net and resorted to something along the lines of transferring his domain, re-hosting it, and rebuilding his site from Wayback Machine archives or something. (He had no backups, of course.)

None of this is NFS.net's fault. There's a good argument in favor of the way they handle account access. On the other hand, with any other hosting provider, this could have been resolved far more easily. ("Tech guy set up my website and then disappeared" is unfortunately a common problem.)

This is why I use Webfaction[1] for smaller projects. It's an excellent mix of command line and one-click Apache/nginx/DNS/email installers. I actually only found them because I noticed a few YC companies using their email servers.

[1] - http://www.webfaction.com/?affiliate=mbesto

I've been using WebFaction for more than 5 years and I've probably deployed more than 200 web apps on their servers. I am very satisfied by their performance and support.

I also use webfaction. Working on migrating a bunch of apps to it. They are just awesome. Best service i have ever gotten.

Note that link above is an affiliate link. Use this one if ou dont want to use the affiliate link:

http://webfaction.com

Shared hosting is hard. Been there, it sux; you have to keep everyone happy with multiple versions of everything. By the end of it, it will look like the primordial soup. Whoever manages to do it and remain sane has my respect; shared hosting can still make quite a bit of money.

Personally I'd like to see stuff like Openshift[1] take off, maybe with a nice interface in front of it so it won't scare off "CPanel" users. It sounds like a nice compromise between shared hosting and "VPS".

[1] - https://www.openshift.com/

I used OpenShift a bit, but there are (unfortunately) a little bit to many problems. For example, they provide only CNAME for mapping your domain. You then need to deal with http://grobmeier.de somehow to be the same with http://www.grobmeier.de. I decided that in my situation I would something easier

As someone who worked for another German webhosting company (not mentioned in the article but more than a million customers), I can tell you that it's extremely hard to roll out new versions of typical software (PHP, Perl, MySQL) when you both want to keep your users on the latest (or a reasonably recent) version while not breaking your users' websites. And because there will always be customers unwilling or unable to switch to later versions, you end up running Perl 5.6, PHP3&4, Frontpage Server Extensions (yes, people still use that stuff) and MySQL 4.

That said, Uberspace is still small enough to take care of their users individually when it comes to support. They can keep their architecture simple (well, so does 1&1, but rumor has it that they have 100 people working in their data center only to replace broken parts in their shared webhosting system), and text-only configuration files and not fully automating everything is still feasible and doesn't hurt yet.

Scaling webhosting while keeping up good customer service is hard. That's why your experience with small hosters will often be better.

With Uberspace you can determine the PHP version to use in a config file. You also run your own PHP interpreter, means you can use your own php.ini etc.

I fully agree with you on the scalability of the customer service though.

Yes, same thing in the system we built and maintained. But believe it or not, even an upgrade from PHP 5.x.y to 5.x.y+1 can cause existing software to break. With a million customers, some of them will hit even the most obscure bugs.

Is it not possible to completely isolate the two different versions? (Something like virtualenv for PHP?)

Providing them with individual versions that they configured isn't a problem at all, even on a per-directory basis. You can do that with Apache and some configuration.

The actual problem is more complex: you always have the conflict between wanting users to use the latest version (because of security issues or stuff like that) and not breaking the software they're running.

Actually 1and1 is running 5.2. Some web software does meanwhile requires 5.3. After all software will break even when there is no upgrade at all.

Anyway, i fully agree: providing hosting is a hard business. Imaging what 1and1 needs to do for this huge server farm... wow. It's ok for a lot of low traffic sites without much functionality, but in my case I needed more at one point. Now I have the choice between 5.3 and 5.4. Thats neat.

>Scaling webhosting while keeping up good customer service is hard

Scaling anything while keeping good customer service is hard. Customer service is a function of product as close to perfect as possible and someone being there when shit hits the fan. With large customer base, the probability of someone hitting a snag/bug goes higher, while adding more customer service representatives is only a linear solution to the people problem.

The amazing thing (as far as I have been following it) is that Uberspace encourages its users to learn to use the command line and SSH instead of restricting them to a "safer" GUI with fewer options.

It will be interesting to see if educating a growing user base does scale (as more knowledgeable admins may ask fewer questions and can find their own answers on StackOverflow) or introduces more (and much more complicated) customer support requests over time.

The wire transfer makes me think these guys are hosting auteurs or the like. They may have a small clientele that they cater to exclusively and personally.

As far as I can see, you really need VPS if you need that amount of flexibility. The only person you can count on to keep your stack up-to-date in the end is you. If you do it, you know what you did. All the host needs to do is make sure someone else's VM doesn't affect yours and bandwidth and power are taken care of.

Running a VPS is an order of magnitude simpler than managing individual software packages/libraries, conflicts and such per client and so you will generally get better service as a result anyway. "Here's a bucket. Do with it what you please (just nothing illegal or resource hogging)." Then you just have to worry about the time you spend on keeping your VPS up to date.

VPS packages are reaching the same cost that shared hosts had a little while back and if AWS isn't an option for whatever reason, it's the better pick.

Edit: I should mention that I use two different hosts. One reseller and one VPS. The reseller on shared is for users who need the nice admin interface for everything, "one-click" installs, DB admin GUI etc... and the VPS for personal stuff and a couple of clients.

You can't just say VPS without mentioning http://buyvm.net/ I'd put up a referral link if I knew how to.

There's of course OVH on its Kimsufi line with full fledged dedicated boxes for as little as 9 Euro a month for good numbers.

> The wire transfer makes me think these guys are hosting auteurs or the like.

Or realise that to ask for 1EUR or more the fees they pay on wire transfer are much lower. WE encourage clients to pay us via bank transfer for this reason - it's free for us to receive with our bank, vs 0.20 + 2.9%.

Sure, we're not trying to do it in bulk (with the wrong reference numbers etc) but given (here in the UK and I imagine Europe) everyone pays their tax this way each year, it's not unusual.

Ah, I didn't think about that. I suppose all these little charges add up to more costs to the customers in the end. This saves you money, customers aren't too inconvenienced and existing familiarity is a plus.

Do they have an english page? For some weird reason Chrome doesn't want to translate their page (http://uberspace.de/)

Edit: Nope. https://twitter.com/ubernauten/status/331007821808279553

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js...

I <3 Uberspace. The service is great, the people are awesome. Jonas visited us at our Ruby Usergroup Booth on the Sigint last year and we talked about problems he had supporting ruby on the machines. Great guy!

Indeed, it's always a pleasure to work with them. Having worked with Jonas before, I can say that they are extremely competent and deliver great customer support. Ask a question by mail and you will get a detailed answer instead of random boilerplate text.

Why not wordpress.com which would scale to better than almost anything else?

For anything more involved, get dedicated servers starting from 15 Euro/month from Hetzner or OVH.

I need subdomains too. And because of time, I didn't want to deal with an own server. 1€ - that's pretty unbeatable. And the service... I mentioned it, it's fantastic. I simply like what they do.

They could have at least supported Sofortüberweisung. Apparently what they want is "echte, klassische Überweisung" (real, classic money transfer). Schade.

I have found an easy with "Dauerauftrag". They automatically assign the money to your account. For me it works out well.

If you don't want to switch to a static site because of your wordpress theme, why not use wordpress.com?

No, its not the theme. I use some plugins which use special tags. I would need to transform these special tags (like f.e. [javascript]) to an equivalent. This costs me a bit time for 181 posts, so I decided to delay. In the end it will become static. That said, I use subdomains a lot, i would miss them on wordpress.com

Reply on news.ycombinator.com