My web host of choice
I am almost twenty-two years old (my birthday is January 22) and designed my first website when I was in fifth grade at the tender age of ten. It’s hard to believe that was over a decade ago but remember Anglefire? That was my host of choice then and it was very popular (I’m surprised to see it is still around… I thought Lycos was dead!). It was free except they required you to put an ad on your page. Not much to ask for a penniless pre-teen. Since then I have used a variety of hosts but my current provider is the absolute best I’ve ever come across. That company is WebFaction.com and it is by leaps and bounds the best bang for the buck. I was originally attracted to the site because it was designed to support all types of Python web application frameworks and Python is my programming language of choice.
The prices are competitive for shared hosting and they also offer dedicated hosting services. But best of all, it automatically supports the installation of applications like Django, Pylons, Ruby on Rails, Zope, Pylons — you name it. In addition, they provide an API to package up your own application configuration and share it with the WebFaction community. They offer full shell access and you can pretty much deploy any web application you wish. The company specializes in Python support so if you are a Pythonista like me, this is definitely the hosting provider for you! (The site started out as python-hosting.com.) Webfaction is five years old and its control panel is rock solid and their staff is responsive and very knowledgable.
One of the greatest features of WebFaction is its inherent support for the entire website development (or any programming project) toolchain. For example, I currently have a Django instance running as well a Subversion repository to host the Django site’s source code and a corresponding Trac site to manage bugs and provide a development wiki. Creating all of this literally took a few clicks. The company is also very personable — their customer support knows what they are talking about. You can talk to their representatives as if they were fellow programmers and, unlike the majority of other hosts, they understand exactly what you are saying the first time you say it. There is also an active user forum in which you can pose questions to other “WebFactionistas” as well as a knowledge base to describe how to perform common operations.
I can’t praise WebFaction’s service enough… they are truly the greatest hosting provider I have ever come across. One small antidote: many other companies in the same business field are still running Python 2.3 or even older versions (!). Within a few hours of the release of Python 3.0, they had deployed the new version to all of their servers. Talk about staying up to date. It really does not get any better than this.
Give them a shot today… I promise you won’t regret it!
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