It was inevitable.
Note: I wrote this last March 2019 and somehow got busy and never posted it. I am due to revamp my blog soon and will be breaking things again. There’s no real reason why I have to post this note here but I just wanted to see how reusable blocks work on Gutenberg.
From 2009 to 2019, I ran a lot of my smaller projects on Webfaction’s shared hosting. I just realized I’ve been with them for so long that I got a bit of separation anxiety when my account got deleted.
Webfaction was acquired by GoDaddy sometime last year and a few months into that, I started receiving the email announcements on the upcoming transition. I totally forgot about those announcements and when the real transition schedule was announced, I was shocked and I panicked.
At first I thought it would be similar to the (mt) Mediatemple acquisition where we’d all get to keep dealing with (mt) people. But it appears Webfaction will completely be integrated into GoDaddy, which is not ideal for what I do. And yes, I’m not a fan of GoDaddy’s hosting interface and their support.
But GoDaddy isn’t all bad, it has improved a lot in the recent years and is definitely better than Bluehost, 1and1 and all the other cheap, and over-provisioned hosting solutions available. Trust me, there are a lot more worse hosting providers out there. With that said, GoDaddy hosting just isn’t for me.
I precisely went with Webfaction years ago as they had the best, no-nonsense control panel for managing shared hosting. Everything was simple and straightforward (at least for me). I still think their hosting panel is better than anyone else on cheap shared hosting.
You can probably tell I’m not a fan of Cpanel, as I find that too bloated to begin with and on shared hosting. I really think Cpanel eats up a lot of resources that should’ve been meant for your actual website.
I had a great time running several projects on Webfaction and never really had any major issues with them. Support is awesome and I don’t recommend people to jump ship just because they moved in with GoDaddy.
In my case, I didn’t exactly need to close my account and the original plan was for me to just transfer all websites on that hosting account into my other shared hosting provider and move other projects into Digital Ocean.
I was supposed to just keep one Webfaction plan running as a backup as well as to keep all those old email accounts as an archive. But I kind of forgot about that and a few months after my account gets deactivated and eventually deleted.
So there, without all those old archived emails from pre-GSuite days, which I never really need anymore, there was no other reason for me to stay or reopen an account with them.