Today I finished switching from GoDaddy where I hosted my WordPress blog and other older sites created in iWeb. The main reason was difficulty in using “Let’s Encrypt Certificates”.

I was running my WordPress site under a Linux Host and I would have to change to their proprietary hosting service and manually renew the “Let’s Encrypt Certificate” every few months.

It took me over a week to get all the changes done, the longest delay was moving my registered domains. I was paying GoDaddy extra to keep my contact information private. So I released that privacy feature and got authorization codes to my new registrar, and GoDaddy emailed me that my domain would be freed on January 17th. Well on January 18th the domain was still with GoDaddy, so I called their technical support.  After waiting on hold for 10 minutes, I got a support person who talked me through an instant release of the domain; slowly because the controls were taking nearly a minute to refresh in our web browsers.  (If you want the shortcut: there is a drop down in the domain control screen in the subtitle bar that allows you to bypass any domain release delays.)

This is an end of an era for my iWeb created pages, they are leaving the web for good, they are not even saved in the way-back machine.

Update: after Go Daddy finally shut down hosting my site several images were broken. I don’t know where those images were uploaded to, because I moved my full media folder.  While I was hosted at Go Daddy, the Word Press updates weren’t automatic and I had someone hack the site and put PDF files randomly on the pages, and Go Daddy called up to let me know the site was hacked and sold me a security scanning tool. (Which I bought because I was busy with other things, but paying for that was another reason I left their hosting.)