I've been with them for quite a while and one thing I've noticed they do differently is that they will upgrade your service periodically while not changing the price. For example, I've gone from 128MB to 512MB of usable memory for my vhost without paying anything but my $9.99 a month. There are other anecdotes (awesome control panel, good support, etc...) that make me think it's unfair to group them with other hosting providers that never do anything but the bare minimum.

I have an account with webfaction and my mysql DB was using more than 256 mb of memory. I immediately got an email saying that I need to lower the usage or upgrade to higher plan.

I was thinking of my next step when I got an email next day that my account has been upgraded to 512 mb memory plan at no cost.

Definitely made the right move by moving from hostgator to webfaction.

Oh, I agree that Webfaction is very very good at shared hosting. It's just that I've learned my lesson and don't plan to be too attached to them.