From Media Temple to WebFaction

Published on 7^th March 2009 in Websites, tagged hosting, Media Temple, WebFaction.

Car tyres are something that you should never have to worry about. Although you might check them for air pressure and tread wear occasionally, most of the time you’re quite happy to just let them do their job. After all, you’ve got more important things to do, like getting to where you’re driving to. You’d be forgiven for taking a good set of tyres for granted, so when they blow out, you really take notice.

And with that analogy neatly set up, it’s time to move on to web hosting. Since about 2002, Thunderbolt was hosted by a friend of mine at his company, Larrytech. It was a great arrangement; I could call him up if I needed support and if we exceeded our bandwidth, he increased it without charging us exorbitant penalty fees. However, about a year ago, the server we were on had a hard drive failure. They had a backup, but it was three days old and a number of other files were corrupted. It wasn’t a tragedy by any means, but it made me realise how vulnerable we were to these kind of events.

Media Temple’s shiny website.

So I looked around and found Media Temple. Their Grid-Service plan is impressive to say the least; 100GB of storage, 1TB of monthly bandwidth, up to 100 domains and most importantly, the ability to survive traffic spikes and hardware failures. Add in their sexy website and a slick control panel, and you’ve got a very tempting deal.

I opened an account in February 2008 and started hosting this blog there. I gradually added a couple of other sites and then when we launched the most recent version of Thunderbolt, I moved that over too. Everything was consolidated, safe in one place. Well, at least that’s what I thought.

It turns out that this new-fangled grid hosting that Media Temple are pioneers of isn’t quite ready for production use. In the week that I moved Thunderbolt over to the Grid-Service, it suffered from slow performance for three days. I couldn’t work out what was wrong; something to do with Thunderbolt or the host itself. After a few days though, the issues cleared up and the site ran smoothly. I even got a MySQL Container – dedicated resources for your databases – free for a month as compensation.

However, last week, part of the Grid-Service ground to a halt. For 40 hours. Forty! Fortunately, we weren’t on the part of the Grid-Service that was affected, but I could smell the danger. It could have been us and it could have been at any time. Thunderbolt might not be a commercial website, but we can’t afford to be vulnerable to that sort of outage.

So earlier this week, I signed up with WebFaction. They offer more traditional shared hosting plans which are cheaper than Media Temple and offer very similar features. Most importantly though, I liked the phrase “Over 99.9% uptime”. There was a healthy lack of complaints on Twitter (in massive contrast to Media Temple) and their servers are located at The Planet, one of the world’s leading data centres. They also backup your account daily for free and keep them for 10 days, which is a huge bonus.

The contrast between Media Temple and WebFaction is immediately noticeable when you login. While the former’s control panel is smooth, the latter’s is humble and workman-like. Gone are the graphical user interfaces for cron jobs and password protected folders; here you have to do those tasks on the command line.

WebFaction has one awesome trump card up its sleeve though; applications. On the Grid-Service, each of your domains has a corresponding folder and you simply put your code in there for it to run. However, WebFaction has a three part model consisting of domains, applications and websites. It works roughly like this; you add a domain, then you create an application, then tie the two together as a website. What makes this awesome is that you can setup an application in a single click. Want a Rails app? Done. Subversion repository? Click and it’s ready. There’s a huge list of available applications and it saves you a massive amount of time working on the command line. It’s hard to explain how it works in practice, but take a look at their tutorial video and it should all make sense.

I’ve also seen an increase in the speed of sites that I’ve moved over to WebFaction. My WordPress control panel is certainly snappier and on Pingdom’s full page load test, all of my sites have been performing better. So for a quarter of the price of Media Temple (once you include the value of my free Container upgrade), I’m getting a faster service on WebFaction.

Yesterday, I finished transferring all of my websites over to WebFaction. All that’s left on Media Temple are my domains, because WebFaction can’t host them. The switch has been easier than I anticipated and I now hope that I can learn to take hosting for granted again.

Update: I’ve also posted the results of latency monitoring which show the difference between response times on WebFaction and Media Temple.