How the death of WebFaction changed my career as developer

For 9 years, I’ve used WebFaction for all my development projects. It hosted my homepage, pet projects, and production of my consultation.

At that time it was a very great service. Point and click to create stuff. But deploying was terrible, manually. But it worked.

But in October 2020, I got an email that this service will vanish in the beginning of December 2020. It felt like the doomsday was approaching. Everything dependend of my three hosting accounts I had with them.

I downloaded the most important stuff, and exported DBs.

In the middle days between Christmas and New Years eve, one of my client called me and complained he couldn’t access a tool I built for them two years ago. Disaster! I blamed WebFaction for this.

But things get better. My new client applied for an AWS Founder Credit, and I did too. Surprised, my application was approved and I got 1,000 USD in Amazon AWS Credits.

But now, it was a chance to learn something new. I pulled down the old repos I had on Bitbucket and containerized these with Docker, with the new credits I hadn’t to worry about the cost, so I pushed the containers to docker-hub and then created containers pointing to these images. Voila!

In the matter of less than a hour, I got the first part of the tool up again, now I am waiting for my domain to be pointed to Amazon Route 53 so my client soon can continue their work.

Throughout my life, I’ve learnt that every failure comes with a new opportunity. When something are lost, I learnt to move on and learn something new and better. Now I got some beginner experience with Docker deployment, Amazon AWS and discovered how smooth SSL works.

Like the pressure of how COVID-19 on the society will drive new innovation that will be useful for post-COVID-19 age and further pandemics.