Moved to WebFaction

Moving from one web hosting to another has become one of the annual activities. However this time around, I had totally forgot about the hosting renewal; this post after 4 months would explain why I forgot about the hosting renewal 🙂

An automatic renewal (which I had not subscribed for) was tried by Media Temple which failed and I got an email notice of the same. 

Media Temples renewal charges of 170$/year was a bit too high this time around; the first year charges were also around the same, but only that the intention of moving to MT last year was different.

Google search for “MT Alternative” resulted in WebFaction.

Unlike MT, I could not find any bad reviews on WebFaction. Also at 8.5$/year (1 year prepayment) WebFaction looked reasonable compared to MT

Note: 5 year prepayment brings down the monthly charges to 5.5$

Also unlike MT, WebFaction comes with one click installers for almost 50 applications including Django, Rails, Drupal and WordPress

WebFaction control panel UI looks user unfriendly at the first glance; however once you start using it you wouldn’t stick to the initial opinion.

Moving hosting from one provider to another is a challenge which I seem to have mastered over the past 3 years. This site has traveled from:

GoDaddy -> Dreamhost -> Media Temple -> WebFaction

In the initial years, the biggest problem was of moving the data. The best solution that I have to found to resolve this problem is:

1. Sign up with the new hosting
2. tar.gz the files which needs to be moved.
3. Once the account on the new hosting is created, you would receive the server details (IP/User Account/SSH Account etc)
4. SCP the file from the existing hosting to the new hosting. Even if the data to be moved is in GB’s, it won’t take much time
5. Unzip the archived files on the new server; setup and test the application (in my case it was all WordPress) on the new hosting. You can access the application on the new server using IP since the domain name would still be pointing to the old server
6. Once the testing is done, you can go about changing the name servers to point to the new server.

It took about an hour or so for me to execute the above 6 steps; However the DNS changes does take a day or more to propagate

WebFaction looks like a decent host and hopefully this annual activity of moving from one hosting to another will stop at WebFaction.

If you want to suggest a better hosting provider, the comments section is always open.