I finished migrating my webserver from webfaction to opalstack. For those wondering if this is a good idea, I would recommend it. It was fairly painless.
Having said that, I did lose a little data: exactly the one post that warned that I was moving! I don't know how this happened, but after checking this is the only thing lost in the transfer.
But in total, migrating and setting up the various websites (static, php, wordpress, flask) was straightforward, although nontrivial. Migrating email and ensuring that I had no email downtime was more important to me, and more annoying.
In total, the accounts I manage had on the order of 10k email messages, which is not very many in the big picture. Creating new matching mailboxes and mailusers was very easy, but somehow the transferring of the messages was a surprisingly time-consuming endeavor.
I also learned that complete DNS propagation for my email took about 41 hours. Well actually, google/gmail took 41 hours, and every other email service detected the change within 23 hours. I suppose this has something to do with the vast multitude of caching that google/gmail must do. But it was very easy (though slightly annoying) to manually sync email for the whole time. (Actually, I'd expected it to take up to 72 hours, so this wasn't so bad).
Long live the opalstack.
(As the one post where I warn about migration disappeared, I'll note that I moved because godaddy bought webfaction and have been changing the service/running it into the ground. I liked webfaction before they were bought, and I've used them for almost 10 years. Hopefully opalstack will stay stable for many years to come.)
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Comments (3)
2021-04-13 Yavor Kirov
Hello David,
Would you please be so kind to tell us (me) of your (further) experience with Opalstack so far?
I myself had to migrate away from WebFaction and I am wondering if now migrating some of my sites to Opalstack is a good idea.
Best regards :)
2021-04-13 davidlowryduda
Hi Yavor,
I'm very happy with Opalstack. After the initial transition, there have been almost no problems. I'll note that for a few months, opalstack's email setup was rocky, but they figured that out. I'd recommend it.
They've been pretty responsive to problems, too. You can see what's troubling people now on their community/support forum: https://community.opalstack.com/.
I know a somewhat common source of frustration is that opalstack doesn't have GNU Mailman for mailing list hosting and doesn't have plans to add it. But this is the only possible deal-breaker I'm currently aware of (and it's not one that affects me).
If you have any particular questions, I can try to answer.
2021-04-14 Yavor Kirov
Thank you! I was looking for an opinion of a long-term user of Opalstack so your answer was exactly what I needed.