Tag: webfaction

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Tech

2022 Cheap hosting and domain

Photo by jovin kallis on Unsplash

I’ve been long term client of GoDaddy when it comes to domains. I think qkaasu.com has been in GoDaddy for 10 years or something. Not anymore.

When Godaddy purchased Webfaction the change was huge. Pricing with Webfaction was clear: Everything was included except special stuff and capacity. When GoDaddy came along, pricing started to be very cumbersome, hard to understand and at the end: pricey.

GoDaddy goes with same plan in Domains. They’re advertising super cheap domains and most of the services are very cheap when you buy them. But, as we know, domain stuff is usually recurring. So, after 3 years or so, cost is much higher and in most cases automatically billed.

In most concrete terms, my qkaasu.com domain with WHOIS privacy was just renewed. Cost for 3 years was whopping 120 USD.

I’ve been saying it many times but I say it once more. I use Opalstack, maybe the best shared hosting provider, to run this and many other sites. Opalstack took what Webfaction had and made it even better. And for my use case it’s perfect.

Even though I love Opalstack, I don’t want to keep my all eggs in the same basket so therefore domains have been in GoDaddy and my DNS is done via Cloudflare (which I really love, btw).

When I got notification that I was invoiced 120 USD for the domain and the privacy product, I got a bit angry and upset because I felt just as it was: I was played.

I somehow remembered that I saw domain registrar stuff in Cloudflare control panel back in the day so in five seconds I was looking at the domain costs in Cloudflare. Cloudflare says that they’re not making any profit from domains. And domain was cheap enough (10 USD / Year). And, of course, privacy product was included in domain price.

If I had moved my domain to Cloudflare earlier, i would’ve saved 90 USD.

Cheap website fast?

I say what you’ll need:

Opalstack for webhosting that scales well and doesn’t need more money every time you use it.

Cloudflare for DNS services and domains. You get DNS for free and domains are cheap. And with quite small prices, you get pretty great services!

And, if you need to send emails, take Mailjet for sending emails. It has free tier and it’s perfect for you.

Do you agree or do you have your own favorite services? Leave a comment. It’s trendy again in 2023!

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Tech

The Thin Client Future

Containers
Photo by Guillaume Bolduc on Unsplash

One day I had interesting chat with a colleague. At work, we have windows and mac computers supported by our IT department. You can also run linux but in that case you’re mostly on your own. Meaning if you have problems you need to figure it out yourself.

Continue reading “The Thin Client Future”
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Tech

Opalstack – The Great Alternative for Webfaction Refugees

Photo by Alexandre Debiève on Unsplash

Looking for good hosting alternatives? Below I’ll be introducing you the Opalstack.

Webfaction was awesome

I believe that many of you share my feelings when you first heard that GoDaddy bought Webfaction. Webfaction has been my favorite hosting platform in business and private. Back then I was so convienced of the quality of Webfaction platform and customer service that we decided to put tens of clients to Webfaction hosting. To be honest, maybe over hundred.

It was so easy to ramp up usage as your costs don’t go up every time you want to test something. In case that you’ve tens of simple wordpress (or similar) sites even the smallest hosting plan goes just fine without any additional costs. Because low usage sites doesn’t generate memory or disk usage that much. And thats about all that generates costs in Webfaction.

Webfaction not so awesome

Well. A week ago Webfaction sent an email to its users. Hello all, we are about to migrate your accounts to tsoHost (UK) . It makes sense. Godaddy doesn’t want to have competing hosting companies under its umbrella. They want to get synergy out of its companies.

Pricing from tsoHost 2020-10-18

Unfortunately, tsoHosting is not very appealing for me. I don’t know what would be the migration plan as it was not described in the migration email. But from pricing perspective Ultimate would be the similar level than my Webfaction account.

And they have those numbers in their pricing. 10 hosted websites. Free standard SSL (for first year). 3 Migrations. Etc. Those numbers I don’t like as I’m coming from Webfaction where you could host 1000 websites in your account if you wanted to. Even though my needs are quite simple nowadays I still want feel the freedom.

Earlier I’ve been able to provide hosting to my hobby clubs etc because why not. I want to be that great guy in the future too.

The best managed shared hosting

So I started googling. Good Webfaction Alternative. Well, the results are poisoned with big players in the market. A lot of marketing sites of big players and too much noise. There’s so many hosting companies that you literally get millions of theoritically relevant results.

So, I didn’t do anything. Too much choices and all them seem to be bad.

A bit later I tried again. Twitter this time. Where would I go if I wanted to change hosting company but wanted to keep similar service than with Webfaction?

Soon I got responses (surprising actually). There happens to be a one-and-half year old company founded by people left Webfaction. The business idea is very same. Simple pricing. Lot’s of tools for developers and admins. Easy setup. Very predictable pricing. All that Webfaction had but design is better and tech behind the solution is better and more up to date.

It’s called Opalstack. They have servers in United States, Germany, Amsterdam, and Singapore. They probably will have more in the future. And they’ve really good customer support. Automatic Let’s Encrypt certificates (no limits) and if you need something they don’t have, you can install it to your user. Rather than trying to limit you they actually support you in all these tasks – even weird ones.

I personally believe that for people like me who don’t want to spend time upgrading OSes in VPSes this kind of managed shared hosting is very good way to fulfill all the needs. And for people that cannot really use cloud native components. As they’re not very cheap if you want to run your own WordPress or similar.

I don’t anymore have clients to put there (I’ve changed jobs). I definately would give them a chance even for that case. My experience of customer support is pretty awesome. They answer very fast and in multiple channels. Even though I’ve had also problems with my sites I’ve got always support in minutes.

Give it a try. Probably the best alternative for Webfaction refugees. And everybody else.