Mediatemple alternatives

The hosting market is a jungle!

For the last year I have been searching for a nice, cheap and clean hosting provider, that could offer a decent alternative to Mediatemple. Mediatemple do have some great products to offer, but they may be a bit to pricy if you're just starting out with webpages. And if you're interested in great flexibility, the Mediatemple solution starts to come short unless you choose one of their pretty expensive virtual or dedicated server solutions.

So far I have tried several different hosting solutions. However I just stumbled upon this great host last month: Webfaction. Webfaction definitely has a great appeal to a customer like me - it's nice and clean, and it allows you to be as flexible as needed and possible. At the same time it's possible to sign up for an plan that's paid by the month, so you get a chance to try it out without wasting a lot of money. Also you're not tied to the same hosting provider for a year like most other places.

Webfaction offers a shared server solution very much similar to Mediatemple's. But it's also a much more flexible solution allowing, among other things, full shell access allowing you to install a lot of different kinds of applications and frameworks for your website. I found the Ruby on Rails and Django options very attractive, but it seems like they got it all (as long as it's 'nix-based).

Also, you get a free database with your website (MySQL for instance) and the bandwidth/disk place ratio is very nice indeed! I also like the control panel a lot.. They have some screencasts that will show you how it all works.

Check it out at http://www.webfaction.com !

This is my first post on this blog, but stay tuned - more great alternatives to Mediatemple will be posted here!