I just moved this domain over from Bluehost to Webfaction. There’s a variety of reasons for this but mainly it just comes down to the fact that Bluehost has been incompetent just too many times for its own good.
Running a web server is not rocket science. You spin up a distribution, install some standard packages and you have a working web host. Things do go wrong though and that’s what distinguishes companies that know what they’re doing from ones that don’t. Time after time Bluehost has proven that they don’t understand the basics of keeping customers happy. Frankly that’s all I want. The actual product could be crappy and held together with gum and duct tape but I don’t care what it does under the hood. I just want my hosting experience to not make me pissed off and be accessible to the outside world. Here are the main issues and differences that have moved me to switch.
Server Status
Bluehost has one crappy page that shows server status whenever they feel like updating it with useful messages like “Our technician is currently investigating a server problem. The source of this problem is unknown at this time. The duration of assessing this is approximately 15 to 45 minutes.” that show without a timestamp or ever show a resolution. I have yet to hear from them about a single reason for the downtime or resolution. Compare that against Webfaction’s status blog.
Control Panel
Bluehost uses an industry standard, cPanel so there’s not much to fault there. However, the login process that they layered on top of it is completely insane. Not only do you send credentials over HTTP rather than HTTPS, those credentials are then SENT RIGHT BACK TO THE BROWSER in cleartext and then sent for a third time in cleartext to the server. Really?
Webfaction has its own control panel which, while less polished than cPanel, is actually incredibly effective and has some very cool abstractions set up for running multiple applications and sites.
Applications
Bluehost comes with a bunch of generic installable applications which are great if you’re a consumer and don’t really do web development on your own. Webfaction comes with a ton of pre-configured packages for Trac, SVN, Django, Wordpress and a variety of others that are more friendly to the developer/technical person crowd.
File organization
This is my bluehost home directory:
[###@box500 ~]$ ls access-logs ioncube public_ftp sources tmp etc logs public_html ssl webalizer.conf fantastico_backups mail sourceguardian thermopy www
This is my webfaction home directory:
[###@web41 ~]$ ls bin lib logs sources webapps
Can you tell which host actually cares about the little details such as not putting random crap in a home directory? Most of the directories in the Bluehost root aren’t ones I’ve created or even touched. It’s similar to Apple’s restructuring of the standard Unix directories to names and a structure that actually *gasp* makes a little more intuitive sense (”what do you mean its not in /usr/share/sbin/etc/lib/? where else would it be?!?”).
Cost
Who cares? Seriously. If you’re paying anything from $6 through $20 a month for web hosting what difference does it make? $14 is one nice lunch a month and that’s really stretching the price differences. I’ll probably end up paying a few bucks more per month for Webfaction but its likely to make me a lot happier.
Mailing Lists
Both hosts use Mailman for managing mailing lists, however cPanel offers an automated way to create/delete them whereas Webfaction does it manually. How often do you actually create/remove mailing lists?
Because Bluehost can’t figure out a way to deal with spammers or understand that a customer who has been with them for over two years won’t suddenly turn into a spam king they limit the rate of SMTP messages you can send. So if you’re doing a reply-all with 20 of your friends, expect that email to take several minutes to complete sending. This is technical competence right up there with login over HTTP.
The Plug
If you’re reading my blog, chances are that Webfaction is a good host for you. Give it a try.