What I disliked about webfaction is that the connection is proxied behind an nginx. But it is true that they have an excellent support. They answer almost inmediately. Also their Q&A was migrated to a stackexchange clone.

I prefer Linode, a little more expensive but you get decide even your own distro. (Yay for Archlinux)

Webfaction is also good if you want to run a no hassle Django installation. I initially got an account when I was learning Django and there weren't many Django friendly shared hosts out there. I have kept it to this day as their hosting panel is still pretty useful. They also have a bunch of automatic installs for rails, cherrypy, pylons, pyramid, subversion and trac etc. I've since moved on to do it myself on VPS but I still think Webfaction offers something different with their "framework" application approach.

Thanks for pointing out WebFaction. Of all the mentioned solutions WebFaction seems to me to be the closest thing to the old TextDrive shared hosting. I'm getting too old to want to get my hands dirty with managing my own VPS for a few simple PHP sites, some email accounts and my subversion repositories (and I can even switch to git).

I have had the same experience.