Tech

WebFaction Versus Media Temple

AKA Hosting Move Update #1 - Speed

It’s been almost a week since I moved this and all my other hosted sites from Media Temple to WebFaction. Given that there isn’t a massive amount of information out there on WebFaction (although there was enough to convince me to try them, thanks to Technorati!) I thought I’d do a short post on how things are looking on this side of the fence.

Host moves can often be a “grass is greener” type of affair. You like the look of a particular feature that your host doesn’t have, or their pricing seems better, or they offer a revolutionary scaling grid system that’ll make your site Digg proof, and you jump ship. I left A Small Orange to move to Media Temple (I seemed to have landed a slightly temperamental server at ASO, but friends have had no such problems with them) in order to host a big future project of mine.

I’m happy to say that, in this case, the grass is altogether greener and far more luscious than it was over t’other side. The main reason for my move was Media Temple’s apparent slowness with the sites I was hosting. These are all low traffic WordPress blogs, so nothing particularly adventurous or taxing, but when the mind boggling tedium induced by simply clicking on the “write” link in the WordPress dashboard became too much to bear I had to try something else.

I set up a WebFaction account for roughly $9.50. I’m in the UK, so I ended up paying VAT on top of whatever they charged, so a straight conversion won’t quite give you the total paid. I figured I could write that off if they ended up being slower than Media Temple and close the account after month 1. Or take advantage of their 60 day money back promise.

I copied one of my sites across, and loaded up the WordPress dashboard. Then, in another browser, on another monitor (yes, I have two monitors - how posh am I?), I loaded up the same site on Media Temple’s servers.

Now, admittedly this isn’t strictly speaking a fair test - there are a number of reasons beyond the host that could account for the difference in speed, but the WebFaction hosted site seemed so much quicker it was untrue. I was seeing ten second load times for the write post page, compared to three seconds on WebFaction. Maybe Media Temple was having a particularly bad night, but tests on subsequent nights confirmed a definite speed difference.

It’s worth noting at this stage that this was a totally unscientific test, and was simply a case of me clicking on two links in two different browsers and seeing which loaded quickest. However, there was enough in it to take things further.

Using the Pingdom’s Full Page Test tool I compared the speeds of the two sites. Despite the fact that an image from the WebFaction site was hosted on Media Temple, the former loaded almost twice as fast as the latter. I don’t have the figures to hand, but it was something like 3.2 seconds for WebFaction, and 5.9 for MediaTemple.

The next step was to move an actual “production” blog across, and see what happened. I migrated Andy’s Colonel Irrelevant and he agreed that the speed was significantly quicker. At this point I decided I’d go for it, and moved the lot. It was cheaper, it certainly seemed quicker, and all my tests so far - without getting too anal about the whole thing - seemed to support that.

Having moved everything, I can tell you that Is There Food is quicker, both inside the bowels of WordPress and loading the page itself. Ian’s Mine Was Taller has also moved, and he’s confirmed that the speed of the site has increased.

All my other sites have benefited from the move too. I’m still waiting for Gary and Nicola to sort themselves out…but that’s another story.

Even WebFaction’s installation of PHPMyAdmin is faster to load and more responsive to use.

Final word: I’m glad I moved. I’ve not closed my account with Media Temple yet because of Gary’s and Nicola’s sites. Annoyingly, I’ve just automatically paid for another month’s hosting, otherwise I’d have pulled the plug on them

WebFaction beats Media Temple in every way but one. At least, from my side of the Atlantic. A future post will discuss WebFaction’s control panel which is a little unconventional if you’re used to CPanel, or indeed Media Temple’s own flavour of admin console. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s more powerful, and actually easier to use, but more later.

What’s the one thing Media Temple has over WebFaction? Their Web 2.0 smugness and sheen. There’s no fancy front page, no “picked last in gym class?”, no cuddly looking icons in the control panel, and no promise of amazing new Digg-proof technology at WebFaction.

It’s possible that Media Temple’s Grid Service is as broken as many Google search results seem to suggest. Their upcoming Cluster Server might fix things, and if they learn from their mistakes there’s no reason it won’t be awesome, so I’ll keep an eye on that.

But when things are working as well as they appear to be at the moment, I’ll take workmanlike over trendy any day of the week.

© 2008 Is there food?.