It took a lot of preparation but I’m happy to announce that we are now offering hosting in Europe (in Amsterdam to be exact). If your websites’ visitors are mostly in Europe then you might want to consider putting your sites on our European servers rather than our American servers.
When you sign up for an account you can now choose between USA or Europe for the server location (note that the Europe location is not available for our managed dedicated servers just yet).
If you’re an existing customer you can also go to Account->Upgrade/downgrade in the panel and order an extra plan in Europe if you want one.
Plans on our European servers are the same price as on our American servers.
If you would like to test the download speed from our European servers you can download a 30MB test file and see for yourself.
Also, as an indication of the overhead difference here is the output of ping from London, UK to one of our servers in Texas (first server) and another one in Amsterdam (second server):
$ ping web207.webfaction.com
[...]
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 153ms, Maximum = 189ms, Average = 163ms
$ ping web208.webfaction.com
[...]
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 34ms, Maximum = 52ms, Average = 43ms
Great, I am planing to host another eCommerce site for our European customers.
Great! I’ll be using this a lot. Is it possible to move an existing account to Europe?
This is absolutely FANTASTIC news! I hope I can migrate my account to European servers! The only thorn in WebFaction’s side was, till this day, its relatively weak support for us sitting in the Old Continent.
Excellent! Marvellous! Fantastic! (running out of superlatives, here).
@Agos: Sure. All you need to do is ask for a new plan in Europe and mention that you want to migrate your account. We give you the new plan with one free week, then you migrate your sites/apps. When you’re done let us know and we stop your old plan.
Unfortunately we are unable to migrate your apps/sites for you because your webapps might need to have some settings changed which only you (or your developers) know about.
Also, if you have a lot of apps/sites to migrate then our API allows you to automate the panel changes: http://docs.webfaction.com/xmlrpc-api/
Very, very good news! Great move! I am wondering how it works with migrating the email boxes and addresses? Will these servers and setting also change when you migrate? And the emails already in them? Also, I suppose it will be a ‘new type’ of account then automatically? And is it also possible to keep the both accounts longer than 1 week (paid)?
@bram: our email servers are completely separate and are only in the US for now.
This is really great news! Up until now, I felt this was the only downside to WebFaction hosting, as my sites felt noticeably slower than the ones hosted on servers in my country. The ping still seems to be a bit slower (30ms vs. 15ms) but it’s much better than to the American server (200ms). Looking forward to migrating!
These things are why I keep recommending WebFaction to everyone. Keep up the great work!
that’s great! just yesterday I checked if you maybe added servers in Europe since I last checked and there they are
As every one else said, THIS IS GREAT, I was waiting for this to happen for a long time now as my customers site is from Israel and for Israeli customers the ping is really faster from the European server then from the USA one (more then twice) for us over here
See you tomorrow, When i sign in the new and improved HSA scuba handicap association site (nonprofit organization so I’m letting my self publish the name over here)
Thank you very much,
Erez Cohen and HSAIsrael.org.il
Glad you like the news! Looking forward to hosting your next sites.
This is great news. I’ve been fretting over the overhead of hosting sites a way over the pond since starting with webfaction.
Is there scope to do something like a CDN? For a Django site. Perhaps just the media files (static these days I think). Changing the MEDIA_URL presumably based on the viewers location.
@Stuart: Yes. It shouldn’t be too hard to do that and your visitors might notice a speed boost.
This might be something that we build into our panel at some point.
Excellent News for me !!! Always worried about my SEO plan and this has made my day now.
Well done again WEBFACTION TEAM !!!
How about having different apps on different servers but on the same plan?
@Lennart: A plan is tied to a specific server so all apps under that plan have to be on that server.
COOL, thanks you….
Seriously guys, I am really impressed! I have just bought a plan on the European server, and pings are better then from the hosting company I used to use (and the hosting company is literally around the corner – < 16 miles).
Well done!
Nice! This is great news for Spanish developers, as our privacy laws makes all the legal matter much easier if the server is in the EU.
I’m very happy about this, thanks Webfaction!
Yahooooooooo!!!!
thanks!!