With the objective to reveal the secret and show the true face of the WordPress hosting service from WebFaction, we carry out in-depth analysis by taking a watchful eye on the service with real using experience for more than 3 months. Meanwhile, to obtain reliable data, we have collected and carefully read hundreds of reviews from real customers. In the following, we mainly concentrate on the price, feature, performance and technical support.
At the first place, we would like to show the above overall ratings of the service that are worked out on the basis our real hosting experience. Please refer to the chart in below for more detailed information.
Is the Price Affordable?
The company provides one package for hosting WordPress websites that is available for both annual and monthly billing cycles including 1/12/24/36 months. Specifically, the price of a yearly subscription is $8.50/mo whereas that of a monthly subscription is $9.50/mo.
With regard to channels for payments, the service supports both credit cards and PayPal. The price seems affordable, however, the service charges additional fees for extra disk space and bandwidth. Please check the following chart for details.
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Yearly Subscription$8.50/mo
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Monthly Subscription$9.50/mo
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Extra 50 GB Disk Space$5.00/mo
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Extra 300 GB Bandwidth$5.00/mo
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Extra 512 MB Memory$7.00/mo
Moreover, WebFaction exerts itself to ensure worry-free purchasing experience by offering a 60 days full money back guarantee that allows webmasters to get a full refund back if they show dissatisfaction by cancelling the service. Please note that after this period, no refund can be received, which is not reasonable when compared to those leading providers who offer prorated money back guarantee.
Is the Feature Rich?
As for the amount of resources, the service is offered with upgradeable resources including 600 GB bandwidth, 100 GB disk space, and 512 MB application memory. In addition, using the service, webmasters are able to host WordPress websites with web servers including Apache and Nginx, and databases including MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite and MongoDB.
When it comes to the control panel, WebFaction designs its own custom panel instead of adopting cPanel. This custom one turns the time-consuming administration of websites to be energy-efficient and easy, together with source control and project management tools and 1-click installer. Besides, the service supports scripting languages such as the latest version of Python, Perl, PHP and Ruby on Rails and other languages that include C++ and Java.
Is the Performance Satisfactory?
Instead of operating with its own data centers, WebFaction has been renting data centers from SoftLayer that is characterized by great performance in many aspects ranging from power density to redundancy, capacity, cooling, location and accessibility. Besides, all servers are housed with top-notch equipment and technologies to guarantee security, resiliency and efficiency. Since some webmasters show a great deal of curiosity of its performance, we would like to show some statistics in the following list.
- Uptime: WebFaction delivers 99.97% uptime averagely.
- Server Response Time: WebFaction takes 795ms on the average.
For the sake of real data, we have hosted 2 websites on a server and launched a real-time monitoring by recording detailed statistics using Pingdom with a 5 minutes interval. According to the outcome, actually, its performance in uptime is praiseworthy. Nevertheless, its performance in server response time is not that blazing-fast but mediocre.
Is the Technical Support Prompt?
The technical staffs trained by WebFaction always go the extra mile to offer a useful solution to deal with a great variety of technical issues within minutes.
Being available 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, the support is backed by well-trained technicians who have a good command of the building, upgrade and administration of WordPress websites. Besides, the questions community is available on its official website where webmasters can refer to a total of 4771 answers to 4011 questions.
With the powerful assistance, webmasters are capable of reaching help via sending email. However, the lacking of support for phone and live chat may results in disappointment because efficiency is bound to be reduced without the help via these two channels.
Conclusion – WebFaction Is Good But Not Blazing-Fast
After we have completed the above comprehensive analysis, obviously, WebFaction fails to make a great performance in server response time. To be frank, this company still serves as a good option for WordPress websites by meeting some common requirements of webmasters.
Nonetheless, if we lay stress on speed, WebFaction cannot keep up with A2Hosting Cloud Hosting that is celebrated for high availability and great hosting environment guaranteed by blazing-fast SSDs. Moreover, A2Hosting hosting service gains tremendous favor because of its affordable price which starts from $9.89/mo with the 34% discount exclusive to people using this promotional link.