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.

(MT) and their GPUs

(MT) have launched (or at least, I can see it) their new GPU monitoring tool today. It’s been mentioned on one or two other sites, and seeing as I’d blogged about them before I thought I’d mention it again.

It’s a fantastic tool; way in advance of anything they had before, and has convinced me that I’ll be staying with them as much host for the future. Regardless of the billing implications for GPU calculations, the tool gives you a way of seeing which pages are the most intensive within your hosting environment. So, for example, Gary’s site (Menori) is generating the most load. I’ll be installing wp-cache for him at some point in the not too distant future. Don’t worry Gary, it’s a mostly painless process. Mostly…

I’d still like to see/know a couple of things: the first is the option to buy an extra allocation of GPUs. (MT) have told me they’re not planning this, but I think it could be handy. That said, it’s possible that you’d end up running lazy code instead of optimising, which is always good practice.  The second thing is SQL resource usage; although I’m not entirely sure that this is factored in to the GPU calculation right now, I’d still love to be able to see how efficient (or inefficient) my databases were performing.

So good job (MT)! I’ve seen some positive comments about this from around the web, so hopefully it will dispel some, or all, of the negativity which is surrounding the dreaded GPU statistic.

Web Host Fun (of MT and DH)

For the past week I’ve been trying to get Dreamhost to give me an account. I paid through Google Checkout, and - for some bizarre reason - they’ve not handed any money over to Dreamhost yet.

Dreamhost think it’s Google’s fault, Google think it’s Dreamhost’s fault. Dreamhost won’t cancel the whole process and let me start from scratch. Google keep saying they’ll talk to Dreamhost.

It’s an impossible position, and incredibly frustrating. I thought I’d give Dreamhost the benefit of the doubt (after reading many negative comments online, but also many positives), but I’m starting to think it was a bad idea.

Regarding Media Temple - or (MT) as they like to be called - I’m impressed with every single aspect of their Grid service bar one: GPU.

After a month of running my Wordpress blog (this Wordpress blog here, the humble Is There Food) which gets a very modest amount of traffic, I’d eaten half of my monthly GPU allowance. Combine that with the fact that I hadn’t yet moved Gary’s Menori across, and that I have some future projects that will consume even more CPU time, and I’m a bit worried that I’ll soon be sailing over my 1000 GPU limit.

The GPU section of (MT)’s control panel is currently offline. According to the site, they’re making it more accurate; which should resolve many of the concerns that customers have with the GPU system. They can’t find out what’s eating their precious CPU time, so it makes optimisation a very difficult task indeed.

So, we’ll see what happens. If Google and Dreamhost can resolve whatever crazy issue they’ve got, maybe I’ll be able to dip my toe in that pool. And if (MT) sort out their GPU panel, I might be able to stick around for a bit.

More news as and when I have it.

And if someone from either Google Checkout or Dreamhost should happen to read this (fat chance, eh?): “HELP!”

And if someone from (MT) reads it: “What’s the deal with the new GPU panel?”