Leaving behind WebFaction

I started hosting This Website with WebFaction in 2008, just after moving to Rochester, with the plan of also using WebFaction’s notably flexible and well-supported systems to host sites using Django (ReportingOn), and ended up using them for multiple other WordPress sites that came up from time to time, as well as other experiments, side projects, and cron jobs over the years.

It was great!

A couple years back, GoDaddy acquired WebFaction, and although I don’t really have anything against GoDaddy — they’re a much better company since switching CEOs around 2011 (you’ll note their Super Bowl commercials took a couple years to catch up, though) — I decided if I was going to endure any switching of control panels and whatnot, I would do it by switching to host This Website at WordPress.com, where I happen to work these days.

This is the point where a better Automattician might write a point-by-point walkthrough of how they moved their personal blog from another host to WordPress.com, but 1) it wasn’t that hard, and 2) I didn’t take proper screenshots along the way. Suffice it to say that all I really needed to do was mash the export button in WP-Admin on my WebFaction-hosted site and mash the import button on my WordPress.com-hosted version.

That’s about it.

OK, OK, so I also had to dig through a decade of bad habits in terms of where I had dumped files and various side projects I had spun up, partially spun down, and left some shred of application standing in my WebFaction admin, just in case I ever wanted to take another run at it.

So where will I house my silly side projects and toy with other programming languages now that I’ve given up my push-this-button-to-launch-a-Ruby-app web host? Heroku. GitHub. My local development environment, now that I’m getting to better know my way around VVV and Docker. (Read as: Copy/paste from documentation and Google the error messages, as always.)

So, thanks for the training wheels and the memories, WebFaction. I’ll never forget the way you burst into flames shortly after I moved my site to your data center.