A few months back I moved our websites off of Pair.com to Webfaction in search of better performance.
I still haven’t cancelled my account with Pair, but I’m already planning on leaving webfaction. The performance is there, the reliability is less than I’d like.
Our sites were down for something around 12 hours a few months back. I couldn’t even get to their support website to file a trouble-ticket and I never saw any explanation or even acknowledgement of the problem. More often, I’ll get a “bad gateway” error because the backend apache server running my sites failed and hadn’t restarted yet. This has hit my wife particularly hard because it keeps happening in the middle of writing posts for her blog, and she’s lost work.
So, I’m going to get a virtual private server from Linode.com. I avoided this in the first place because I didn’t want to deal with system administration, but truth is, it isn’t going to be that much work, and its going to be more expensive. The upside is that I’ll have complete control to tweak things.
Update: Shortly after posting this, someone at Webfaction saw my post and emailed me, offering to help with the bad-gateway problem. I’ve been giving it a try. It seems potentially better, but it has eats more aggressively into my memory allocation. We also went back and forth about the downtime I had at the end of may, but I still don’t have an explanation I’m satisfied with. I am satisfied though that they are going to make their support offering more robust. I’ll see how it goes. I’d already paid for a month of service at Linode, so I’ve been tinkering with getting a VPS set up to see how it performs.
What did you decide about WebFaction? I also moved to them from pair, and I like the setup better than pair, but I’ve been getting 502s all over the place. Just made the jump recently, so I’m hoping it smooths out, but it has been frustrating. Have you looked at SliceHost?