Web Host Smackdown: 6 Hosting Plans Reviewed

Media Temple: (gs) Grid Service

The (gs) Grid Service offering from Media Temple was a standout in this study, and in more than just the price tag—although at $240 per year, it isn’t exactly ideal for a spare test bed. Media Temple’s server cluster infrastructure is marketed as an extremely reliable system for hosting sites that may experience an unexpected burst of traffic; that is, experiencing short periods of a considerably above-average load, such as being featured on Slashdot or Digg.

Media Temple’s Django and Rails deployment solution, called Containers, were a highlight in this review. Starting at $20 per month, a container is essentially a mini virtual private server for your Django, Rails, or MySQL setup. A Django Container, for example, dedicates a certain amount of RAM for your Django applications, and provides easy management of your Django version and installed eggs for each container. (A container is essentially a lighttpd server in front of FastCGI threads, all preconfigured.)

The Media Temple control panel is extremely well designed and offers a reasonable level of control over systems. In particular, the panel offers considerable documentation, and even comes with a guide outlining usernames, access domains, and other service details. While the panel itself lacks the same level of control as other reviewed offerings, it’s extremely usable for deployment. At the time of writing only Drupal, WordPress, and Zen Cart were available as one-click install options.

Worthy of mention is the Media Temple Knowledge Base, an amazing resource with unmatched depth among web host guides. It even includes video tutorials suitable for end users, such as email program configuration.

The Joomla install result was identical to that on DreamHost; all required settings met, and once again we found that display_errors were set to ON. Our CakePHP deployment went off without a hitch, but it’s the Django/Rails Container system that makes this offering worth every dollar: we had our sample Django application open for business within minutes, as opposed to the better part of an hour for A Small Orange and DreamHost. A single container managed multiple applications just fine, and application-level controls were extremely handy for deployment.

RailsPlayground

RailsPlayground offers a fairly standard range of managed, VPS, and dedicated hosting services—we chose Developer Hosting Level One. The servers are relatively standardized, running cPanel 10, and the company is well-known in Rails and Django circles for offering a less painful FastCGI deployment than usual. Interestingly, RailsPlayground offers a DIY lighttpd deployment solution with FastCGI for a static process, for which the support group allocates a dedicated port.

The cPanel setup was near identical to A Small Orange’s, and will make sense to anyone with experience on a previous version of cPanel; for the rest of us, a collection of introductory videos was helpfully offered at first login. Interestingly, the cPanel offers a section for installing PEAR packages, an option that may be useful for working with applications that require them, especially open source projects.

While testing Joomla and CakePHP deployment, we had to manually make folders world-writable for the web server; without this, Joomla was unable to update its own configuration file, and similarly CakePHP complained about insufficient control over its temporary folder. Luckily, SSH worked out of the box with the access details in one of the five emails you’ll receive from RailsPlayground when starting your account. A couple of chmods later and we were ready to roll. Once again, Joomla found that the display_errors setting was ON, but otherwise Joomla and CakePHP were functioning fine, including URL rewriting for Cake.

Django deployment was a breeze on RailsPlayground—less so than Media Temple’s approach, but relatively straightforward nonetheless. Serving files over a separate domain was no issue, and the server we worked with had the latest stable version of Django installed, with django-admin.py ready to go. The RailsPlayground wiki has a helpful guide to Django and Rails deployment explaining each step.

WebFaction: Shared 1 Plan

Last and perhaps not least—we tested WebFaction's Shared 1 plan, an offering which is possibly the most unique in this roundup.

WebFaction, formerly known as python-hosting.com, specializes in web application deployment, with stunning results. The control panel is a fairly straightforward affair, a custom system that gets the job done—well, until we look at domains and applications. WebFaction has a unique approach to one-click installers, creating applications under a ~/webapps folder, with everything from Rails to Drupal to Django available. Once an application is created, a web site can then be configured to mount one or more applications at particular URLs.

We started out creating a “Static/CGI/PHP” site, and had the Joomla pre-install check ready within a minute. The only warning from the installer was our old friend, display_errors—ON instead of OFF—with everything else ready to go. Our CakePHP install revealed some unexpected issues, however: owing to WebFaction’s managed URL rewriting for each application, we were unable to have mod_rewrite use Cake’s own pretty URLs. Everything else, however, was working fine.

The control panel really shone in our Django deployment, however; the process was so straightforward, there was no need to login over SSH to get the first project template up and running. A wide variety of Django versions (at the time of writing, 0.96.3, 1.0, 1.0.2, and trunk) were all available and recommended, with a handful of prior releases marked “INSECURE.” WebFaction even offers a choice between mod_python and mod_wsgi; we tried the WSGI approach for this review. After creating a Django trunk application, we could load up the URL immediately and were ready to go.

The deployment was just about on par with Media Temple, and at less than $10 per month (depending on how much you pre-pay), this is definitely an excellent option for Django development. If you’re interested in frameworks such as CherryPy, Pylons, Turbogears, or anything else that you might like to run under mod_python, have a look at the WebFaction plans; official support for all of these is included out of the box.

The Verdict

We’ve explored several excellent options for managed hosting in this review, and which one you choose is up to you and what you need. Here are our picks for common scenarios.

No-hassle Rails/Django Deployment

For deploying a Rails or Django application with as little fuss as possible, it’s hard to go past Media Temple. Their Grid Server platform could be more flexible, but the Container system makes pushing your application live a breeze, while still being compatible with your existing version control.

Runner up: WebFaction’s Django and Rails deployment system is incredible, with a little more flexibility than the Media Temple option, and at a more agreeable price point. Definitely worth a look.

PHP Deployment Server

A Small Orange wins this hands down. The cPanel 11 administration panel has more than enough options to keep PHP under control, and the servers are sufficiently powerful for whatever you plan to throw at them.

Runner up: RailsPlayground: just the right amount of power to get your applications up and running, and support for enough non-PHP environments to explore. Just watch out for those file permissions!

General Web Development Test Bed

We’ll have to go with WebFaction for this one, with a multitude of options for trying out PHP, Django, and Rails applications with no fuss. A purpose-built architecture gives you the flexibility to try out applications to your heart’s content.

Runner up: A Small Orange. With plenty of flexibility, relatively up-to-date libraries and applications, and a stable environment, you’ll be able to avoid deployment hassles.