Closest thing to WebFaction?
Hi, I might have found the closest thing (or even better) to WebFaction, when it comes to price/value ratio and developer culture!
I found it in this Reddit thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18869137
This guy seems to have migrated to SSDNodes. Check out some of the pricing:
https://www.ssdnodes.com/pricing/
9.99 USD / month, gets you 24 GB memory (is that RAM?), 120 GB SSD, 4 vCPUs!
This service seems surreal! Of course that may be part of the sales offer, but the offer was also there on Friday (in fact it expired while I was at work on Friday), so maybe it's a semi-permanent offer for now. Plus, they seemingly offer price-locking.
Check out some of their articles and get a feel for their mindset and culture... What is this? A self-hosting guide?!
https://blog.ssdnodes.com/blog/self-hosting-handbook/
I have a very good feeling about this!
Personally, I think I'll be moving my business to them. I'll let you know once I'm in, regarding their UI (or lack there of).
Comments
Thanks for sharing. Did you have a cloud plan with Webfaction? How managed are/were the servers?
I just had a shared plan and have a small website just for a hobby, so I don't run a business on the web. Webfaction and Dreamhost seem to be the only ones offering shared hosting that can serve Django applications.
SSDNodes appears to be a direct competitor with Digital Ocean and Linode. I've been considering Digital Ocean due to their one click installers, reasonable (?) prices, and extensive help documentation (granted you could use their help information while using a different host).
SSDNodes seems a bit suspicious with their countdown sales. I'm never been a fan of that sales pressure tactic. Please share what you find out.
I have a shared plan too. I run a collection of smaller apps and websites, but I use python, php, postgres, git, static html, cron jobs, SSH, etc..
What I really liked about WebFaction is the ability to deploy anything I needed. I've been looking into deploying a Seafile instance next...
I've pretty much given up on finding a managed solution similar to WebFaction, at this point. So I've been reading the Digital Ocean documentation, and preparing to move to an unmanaged, pricier instance, that's why I was thrilled to find this... It looks great value for money.
Now that a few days have passed, I cooled down though, and I found several other providers with similar pricing. Not sure about performance, but they advertise multiple cores, etc.. A quick search in Reddit for SSDNodes revealed to me that most of these services probably overprovision their packages. That is, multiple users share the advertised resources.
I'll let you know once I've actually decided and have some hands-on experience...
look forward to reading what you find out.
not sure about someone that offers a plan at $10 per month if you sign up for three years versus $90 a month if you go for the monthly plan in order to test out their service. In any event i have gone to A2Hosting. i am tired of looking around and finding nothing like webfaction. Before that i had Textdrive another great service. i am resigned to having to live in the "web suburbs"
Hey folks,
I worked at WF for 4 years (https://community.webfaction.com/users/10/klynton) and managed the sysadmin team for a while.
Just wanted to say something is coming
Hi klynton !
Is there a light at the end of the tunnel?
Precisions would be necessary, before we are all engaged everywhere ...
I’ve been asleep at the wheel and thought nothing of the GoDaddy take over but the “migration” email yesterday has woken me up. I don’t want to be migrated - I’ll move myself. I have a few websites and I’ve ended up hosting sites for folks that I’ve built them for. I’d rather not be doing this but having people pay me to host covers the cost of my own sites. WF was ideal for this but others have been a nightmare. 1 and 1 were awful and Hostgater turned to shit too. I’ll be watching this forum for any suggestions or ideas. Has anyone had any experience of DreamHost
I'm actually quite happy with A2 http://www.a2hosting.com?aid=a2hostingsolutions
For those of us thinking of going elsewhere do you have any idea of the rough timescales for the "something" you mention above? If it's likely to be close to the migration date, or someone's next WF renewal, we might have to make decisions a lot sooner.
I've been a Dreamhost customer for a long time (since 2005) and they offer great value for money, functionality and flexibility imho. That said, some of the stuff I run means that it needs hosting in the EEA rather than the US (latency and data protection reasons mainly). I've also had problems with DH during outages (see my comments in the discussion on Django hosting) but that was a while ago now and less of an issue because I always take my own automated backups. That said, I found performance for Django applications to be poor via Passenger but it was some years ago and that (along with EEA hosting) was why I moved some sites to WF. So, I tend to use Dreamhost as a bit of a test area these days.
Well do keep us informed here! . In the meantime i am in the process of vacating WF for A2HOSTING.
PS too bad your plans were not announced earlier... i spend countless hours and days looking for a replacement.
Hey again,
Since there are so many responses I figured I'd just do another post:
We put up a quick landing page today: https://launch.opalstack.com
I'm not quite to the point where I can give you specific details yet. So much has been built but there's a lot more to do.
I would have announced this earlier but I was still holding out hope that WebFaction would continue to run.
For timescale: we'll be opening the (virtual) doors on April 15th and try to get as many people on board as possible.
We are planning to be around for a long time so if you don't like where you ended up keep us in mind.
I hope this arrives before Webfaction shutdown completely. I still have one account not linked to GoDaddy.
If they follow what they said in the email, we will be open long before any migrations start to happen.
Thanks for joining us here Klynton. I'm happy to have you aboard, and very excited about your upcoming project. I just signed up for the mailing list.
Great! Thank you for setting this place up.
Do you have plans to use the WF API to make importing easier? I've asked WF support for a dump of my account's config but if I can't get that I'm planning to do the work to create machine-readable output with the API. Whatever I do I need to set everything up programmatically again somewhere else...
Definitely interested in your planned offering!
That will be a nice stress test of the tooling we've built!
Nothing solid yet. There are so many things still in the works still.
Great! The platform is pretty fantastic. I hope everyone loves it as much as I do.
@klynton You have no idea how happy you've made me. I'm glad I remembered to check back on these forums (Thanks again, @kjodle ). The fact that you have Sean F onboard means everything to me because he was the one who answered the two technical questions I wasn't able to muck out on my own over the years.
Glad to have you! We're still busy working away (just about a week until launch day now).
@klynton hope all is going smoothly with your launch preparations.
I have a WF API based approach to extracting my mailbox and forwarder configs now. If you want me to test any API or import approach please let me know. Are you planning an XML-RPC-style API like WF has? Or some other flavour? Happy to look at your docs and give it a go!
Things are progressing, whether they are smooth or not is a matter of perception I guess.
We'll definitely have an API. The API will be JSON. XMLRPC has fallen out of favor in recent years so we decided to just go with JSON.
Aw, I think there's something in my eye :'-)
Very happy with that!
@klynton Today is April 15! What time are you gonna update https://opalstack.com/ ?
No specific time, we're still playing it by ear. (There's always one more thing that needs to be done.)
Is there a chance we can see generally what your plans will offer, and pricing, before you officially launch?
Thank You
I just realized I forgot to post an update here about us having to postpone the launch date to April 29th.
Pricing isn't available yet.
As for features: All SSD servers in great geographical locations, an API that can do almost everything the control panel can do, and most of the features that WebFaction had: custom apps, PHP apps, Python apps, etc.
Thanks for the update, @klynton. We are really looking forward to this launch!
klynton Just to let you know, your web page still has April 15 in the third paragraph. Might confuse some people.