Why Your Web Hosting Provider Matters.

As mentioned earlier, I have moved to a better hosting provider and I am currently loving it. For the price you pay, the features are well worth it. Before I go on and elaborate on Webfaction's features, I would like to let you guys know the events that led me to this move.

The reason for moving to webfaction was my disdain towards the limitation of my older (crappy) web hosting provider who promised me python scripting, fast-cgi capability and even provided me with SSH connectivity which you don't usually get with cheaper web hosting costing $20 a year. Their features indicate that they are capable of running any of the popular python web frameworks out there and a project just came up which required me to use a fairly light weight (well, at least compared to the other alternative) python framework. What luck, I thought to my self. But what often seems to be too good to be true and all this for $20 a year. However, these promises are candy coated lies as I would soon realize.

The Crap

Before I was able to do anything, I encountered some minor issues with the hosting provider's client login section. Despite having fully paid for my service, their system was not able to activate my account for some time and had to contact technical support. They did not reply the same day and I had to wait for a little over two days before I got a response from thier support team. After 51 hours of waiting, I was able to finally use my account. The first impression I got was "crappy service", but I was still hopeful. As it turned out, my problems did not end there.

While working on my project, I decided to test out my SSH account, everything went smoothly. And then I tested a python framework known as the pyramid python framework. So far so good, I thought. Everything was running but after a few days my site was suspended without warning. They never notified me the reason for suspension until I got out of my way to ask them. And the culprit, the admin said, was that my python web framework was supposedly hogging up their servers. I promptly disabled the framework and went ahead to look for a better hosting service. The funny thing was I was that I was ot even working on a project yet. The pyramid framework I uploaded was a "vanilla install" so to speak, without a line of application code written yet.

Now you may say that cheap web hosting service providers are unsuitable for python frameworks, and I would agree with you with that. However, just for comparison, I have tested many python frameworks(Pylons, Pyramid and Web2py) and installed them on many cheap web hosting sites?? most of which are even without SSH(I had to write? a CGI script for BASH access and a lot of uploading of libraries etc.) and these where running on normal CGI, not even close to FAST-CGI. And none of these hosting providers have suspended my or my client's account for it, in fact two web2py python framework based projects are currently running on a certain non-ssh, non-fast-cgi provider right now as we speak and have been running on that hosting provider for well over 6 months now. They are very slow of course but I would just want to point out that even some hosting providers which should not even run python framework is even more capable of running python frameworks than my previous hosting provider, a provider that claims ssh, fast-cgi, python and what not but will break down as soon as you use these features a bit.

The Solution

I went ahead and decided to go with a real python web hosting provider which offers much much more and more importantly, a web hosting provider that actually delivers - webfaction. I have alot of PHP websites around different web hosting providers and a few python websites as well. When I got my webfaction plan, I found out that I actually get 100GB of disk space, 600GB of monthly bandwidth, an equivalent of 250MB of VPS memory good for 2 python frameworks,? almost an unlimited number of domains can be used, mysql and postgresql, wsgi, PHP, python, rails, and SSH among a lot of other things.

Webfaction is not a cheap hosting provider but if you have a lot of PHP websites and own a lot of domains, a single webfaction account will suffice which still comes out cheaper than having multiple crappy hosting providers. Even if you just plan on having one higher-than-average-traffic website, or plan on hosting python then the features and reliability of webfaction is something you will come to appreciate. Since we have moved to host some of our websites at webfaction, we have not encountered a single problem yet.

The Lesson

The lesson in all of this is that sometimes, when it comes to hosting providers, they promise, or even implies one thing yet delivers a lot less.In the end, there is always a price to pay for lessons learned and that price may come in the form of wasted time, effort, money, and a lot of frustrations in between. So if you are serious about hosting a website, specially a python-powered website, do yourself a favor and get a reputable web hosting provider.