I've been nothing but impressed with the service I've got from WebFaction and the reliability I've gotten from their servers. I even had a very high traffic site run on a WebFaction shared account without a hitch.

Today, however, we got a first hand look at the downside of a shared server. If you're a webfaction customer you should be (no really, you should) subscribed to their status blog It's a great way to be kept up to date on any issues that might affect your site. The most recent issue has to do with the MySQL server on web49: the server that we happen to be using to develop a very large project. As you can see from reading the entry, the problem appears to have been caused by a corrupted database table (not one of ours) which was causing some unreliability with the database server (our Django based site was intermittently unable to connect to the database and, when it could, intermittently unable to authenticate). Though they thought they had it fixed, the problem returned and while they're attempting to fix it for good they've rolled back the entire database server to a known good backup.

This is a good approach as it means that everyone should still have most of their data in the meantime. Unfortunately, we happen to be in the middle of populating the database with the data we need to go live in the near future. Rolling back the database even by a day means that we've lost a ton of work. We should get it all back once the problem is fixed, but of coruse that means that we have to put the work on hiatus until the problem is fixed to avoid versioning issues.

This right here is the perfect illustration of why a dedicated server is a good idea. Yes, a shared server might be able to support your site. But it also leaves you vulnerable to the actions of the people you're sharing the server with. If someone else does something stupid that corrupts a database table on a server that they share with you suddenly you stand to lose a lot of work. If someone has a poorly written app that somehow manages to crash the server or even just eat up all the RAM, your site goes down. With a shared server you simply don't have the security of knowing that your site is stable and secure even if you trust your hosting company and you trust your code.

That security is what you're paying for when you get a dedicated server over a shared one.

As I mentioned in my last post, I recently migraded my dy/dx tech website to a different hosting company. If you've really been paying attention, you may recall that not too long ago I had gotten a Media Temple hosting account with the plans on migrating all of the sites I host, both my own and clients' to it only to discover that setting up Django on a Media Temple (dv) account is far more trouble than it's worth. My estimation of that hasn't changed, in fact I actually cancelled my Media Temple account a few weeks ago after the last client I had hosted there was moved off to another host. My experiences with WebFaction have been so positive (exploding data centers notwithstanding), that I have instead migrated everything to their servers. Well, not everything yet. This blog is still hosted on DreamHost for the time being (though I plan on moving it to a WebFaction hosted WordPress blog in the very near future before eventually migrating it to a Django based solution as I've mentioned before).

The hosting hassles referred to in the title, thankfully, have nothing to do with the actual hosting companies I'm dealing with, and are instead due to a foolish mistake on my part: when I switched my domain to WebFaction, I forgot that I had custom MX records enabling the use of my hosted google apps for my domain. As a result, as the new DNS information started propagating, people stopped being able to send me email. Fortunatly, it was an easy fix to just change the MX records with WebFaction, and I don't think I missed any important emails, but if anyone out there got a bounceback when sending me an email, that's why.

Currently I've got two projects hosted on WebFaction servers. So far, I really like them. As managed hosts go, they're probably the best I've worked with, and they certainly make life very easy when building Django powered sites.

Today I got an email from one of the clients whose project is hosted on WebFaction saying that their site is down. So I checked it out, and while I was able to access it, it was extremely slow, to the point where a less forgiving browser/LAN setup might cause it to time out. So I fired off a support ticket to WebFaction, and within a couple minutes, not only was the site back up to speed, but I was provided with a very good explanation for why my server was having problems.

Apparently there was an explosion at one of WebFaction's data centers this weekend. It took out power to the data center, but fortunately no one was hurt and none of the servers were damaged. Obviously, there have been some interruptions in service for the servers in that data center (which includes both of my WebFaction projects), but they've already gotten a significant number of the servers back online (though only one of mine).

Amazingly, this is actually the second time I've had a server taken out by an explosion at a data center. The first time was with a hosted Microsoft Exchange server with a hosting company in London.

It really sucks having sites down, especially critical ones (fortunately only one of the projects I have hosted with them is critical, and it's the one that's back up already), but as reasons for downtime go, you have to admit that an explosion is a pretty good one.