For a long time now, my blog has been powered by WordPress and hosted on GoDaddy shared hosting.
Last week I noticed that the blog was down, and when I opened GoDaddy’s shared hosting administration area, I got a database connection error message.
I then did what anyone in this situation would do: get help!
However, contacting GoDaddy support proved completely useless, as all I got was something along the lines of “yes, there’s a problem and we’re working on to fix it; no, we don’t know when it’s gonna be fixed, so please try later”…
Just had a chat with @GoDaddy support, their server is down and all I got was "we know it's down, just try later..." #fail @GoDaddyHelp
— Pedro Lamas (@pedrolamas) March 7, 2017
After some 5 hours, the blog was back up and running… but there was a big problem: some content had disappeared!
I’m guessing they had some problem with the database server, and their “fix” involved recovering the databases from an old backup.
Seems @GoDaddy hosting admins "fix" was to RECOVER AN OLD DATABASE BACKUP, so all my latest changes have been lost... @GoDaddyHelp https://t.co/ROROWqxfQP
— Pedro Lamas (@pedrolamas) March 10, 2017
That was the final reason I needed to completely ditch WordPress and GoDaddy, and migrate to something faster and more recent: this blog is now fully powered by Jekyll and hosted in GitHub Pages!
Major advantages of this approach are:
- No more MySQL or any other database server involved
- full control over rendered content
- everything is statically generated on every commit of the git repo, so it’s blazing fast!
- I can host it for free in GitHub Pages and add some nice features like allowing other people to send me Pull Requests with fixes and improvements (or just to correct my recurrent typos!)
This right now is actually the first post I write in the new platform! :)
There are still a few quirks to fix, so if you find any problem please report it by creating a new issue and I’ll take care of it as soon as possible!
