[streptomycin]

The Webfaction situation was so weird. You have a very customizable, powerful, idiosyncratic shared hosting service that's going to be basically impossible to migrate to any other hosting provider. And it gets bought by GoDaddy of all people? And the plan is to migrate users to normal GoDaddy shared hosting? I wonder if they gained even a single user from that purchase. For me, the idea of switching to GoDaddy was a complete non-starter.

[542458]

For anybody not familiar, WebFaction was “shared hosting for nerds”. The control panel gave you a lot more power than most shared hosts did, you had SSH access, and you could spin up servers for pretty much every web programming environment going with a couple clicks. When Godaddy bought them they transferred everybody onto bog-standard and much less flexible Godaddy shared hosting, and everybody who was using a less-common web stack was dropped.

I’m still cheesed about it, and more than a bit confused. Godaddy had and still doesn’t have any of the value prop that webfaction did. Godaddy didn’t integrate the WF technology or customer base in any meaningful way… so what was the point? Was it an aquihire?

[voakbasda]

To me, this kind of acquisition speaks of anti-competitive behavior. They didn’t want the product or people; they just didn’t want to compete with them.