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.