MDDHosting is a good WebFaction shared hosting alternative

My goal was to find shared hosting because I don't want to spend time installing and patching apache/... all the time.

I searched for a long time for the ISP least likely to get humped to death by GoDaddy or EIG.

I eventually settled on $10/mo MDDHosting after talking with the owner Micheal (who is easy to reach in their very good support system) who let me know "We have no plans on selling to EIG or GoDaddy. We have no plans on selling to anybody at all...The only way we'd ever sell is if we really truly believed that the company purchasing us would maintain or improve our service and support. Those are fairly high bars so I don't anticipate that even being a possibility" and he has consistently said similar things on webhostingtalk.com

During my migration my support items were answered promptly and with no-bullshit answers (usually from Micheal directly) that solved the problem, and were honest and full of meaningful technical details when/if there was going to be some delay in solving the problem.

MDDHosting is not super programmer-focused like WebFaction was, and for shared hosting it is a cPanel host BUT (don't click away too quick) I discovered that cPanel actually DOES have an API that does all the things that I needed from the WebFaction API (create websites, create forwarding emails, create databases, lots more...). For more info on that see this post: https://forum.kjodle.net/discussion/20/surprise-api-cpanel-shared-hosting-actually-is-a-webfaction-alternative

MDDHosting is clearly a small outfit and I prefer that.

MDDHosting had a rare and major major multi-day outage in September 2018 due to a command mis-typed by an admin, and throughout the whole process they remained transparent about what was happening and what they did afterwards to make sure it doesn't happen again (see http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1731410 and especially https://forums.mddhosting.com/topic/1582-major-outage-092118-09242018/ ). I agree with the WebHostingTalk.com poster here http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1731575 who says "The way MDD Hosting is handling this catastrophe, on top of the top-notch service I've had from them for over three years, in which they have gone above and beyond in customer service, makes me more likely to recommend them rather than less."

The only gripe I have is that MDDHosting does not make a C compiler available to shared hosting accounts (in an attempt to make it harder for script kiddyz to download premade coin miner packages). This makes it harder for me to install certain Perl modules. But I can use my shell and there is ssh support.