

Web hosting, but good - grobmeier
http://www.grobmeier.de/web-hosting-but-good-05052013.html

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gingerlime
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.

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

~~~
ddorian43
They use cgroups:

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

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kaolinite
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).

~~~
thaumaturgy
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.)

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mbesto
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>

~~~
niclupien
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.

------
Nux
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/>

~~~
grobmeier
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

------
_ak
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.

~~~
untitaker_
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.

~~~
_ak
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.

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

~~~
_ak
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.

~~~
grobmeier
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.

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eksith
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.

~~~
porker
> 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.

~~~
eksith
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.

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anthonymonori
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>

~~~
Nux
[http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js...](http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fuberspace.de%2F)

------
bitboxer
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!

~~~
chokma
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.

------
jasonlingx
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.

~~~
grobmeier
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.

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

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

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

~~~
grobmeier
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

