On my tweet “no innovation in local hosting industry. All we got is Yet Another Cpanel Hosting.”, r0kawa of Zenpipe replied on what’s my suggestion to improve our local hosting industry. My quick answer to him was to just look at how webfaction run their hosting services. Now I have some time to write a little more, I’d like to share my insight on this topic.

To fully embrace what webfaction has done in hosting services maybe a bit too much so I have 2 things that I’d like to see in our local hosting service.

• Process isolation

All local shared hosting that I know use mod_php in their infrastructure running as global main process that was shared for every users on that server. To enable functionality such as file upload, users has to allow write access to their directory to this global process which as a result, made it writable to everyone on that system. Workaround has been taken such as by enabling safe_mode directive in PHP but most of the time it caused more trouble than the problem it try to solve.

Webfaction solved this by using mpm_peruser instead of the usual mpm_prefork or mpm_worker which allow them to assign each user dedicated apache process independent of each other. Another possible solution is mpm_itk which also can accomplish the same thing. It’s just a matter of benchmark to see which one perform the best in massive deployment. My experience on webfaction quite satisfying. Webfaction also goes one step further by allowing user to have their own Apache environment stack running on custom port that was then proxied through by the main apache process (later on they switch to nginx as their main front end server). This mean user’s process truly isolated from the main process and other users on that shared server.

• Shell acces

These days, I just can’t imagine deploying my site using FTP. If you can’t give full shell access, at least make it possible to use tools such rsync or scp to transfer files to the server. While I realize the fear of granting shell access to random users, webfaction include it even in their basic plan so there must be some way to this correctly.

There could be much more but this the things that I’d like to see from local shared hosting provider. Yes I can get all this from VPS but to developer like me, shared hosting such as webfaction much more appealing because it free me from doing all the sys admin job to maintain the server while at the same time still have all the tools that I like for development. Otherwise, you are just ‘Yet Another Cpanel Hosting’.