Hosting: Linode

Last year, after almost a decade of using them as my host, WebFaction started shutting down. They’d been sold to GoDaddy back in 2018 and had mysteriously stopped working on any feature-development about then, so it wasn’t a huge surprise.

So, I bit the bullet, and switched to Linode.

This isn’t entirely something I’d recommend to everyone who’s used to using a service like WebFaction. WebFaction, despite being more fiddly than many hosts, still handled a lot of things for you. It ran servers and managed their configuration; you just told it that you wanted an app of type X to run, and it did.

Linode, by contrast, is a VPS host. That means you get a virtual server, and have to manage it yourself. So I’m spending $5/month for their shared 1GB plan, and it gets me a virtual machine (I picked Debian) that I have to ssh into and cope with.

Now, Linode does offer a lot of guides to setting up servers, which I found very helpful. It’s still a fiddly learning experience — tuning the software to work on your VPS is a pain, and I wound up with Apache using slightly too many resources that led to a CPU spiral over a few days.

Still, if you’re willing to put the work in, or just have more complex needs than "HTML is here", it’s a good hosting option.

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