GCHQ is not exactly any rosier than the NSA. I don't know why OP imagines that WebFaction (UK company) is immune to spying in a way that Google isn't.
I'm afraid this will be characteristic of the anticipated mass exodus. People will move away from US services because it makes them feel good, but their destinations are going to be either Five Eyes territory or countries that don't even feel a need to hide their surveillance apparatus.
At least for e-mail, I think the idea is to ensure that a cloud provider doesn't have a long backlog of his e-mails. Of course, if the NSA take an interest in him, they'll still find a way to monitor his current e-mails, but this makes it harder for them to pull all his past e-mails. I doubt WebFaction is secretly storing all the e-mail he has deleted, because that costs money, and they can't show advertising next to it.
They are quite probably reading it, and I think I read something about a buffer of a few days that they kept things for. But they're probably not keeping all of everyone's communications in case they want to refer to them in five years time. Whereas on GMail they can dig back through years of old e-mails as well.
At the very least, it adds a small per-person cost to their surveillance, because they have to store copies of e-mails themselves rather than getting Google to do it.
I'm afraid this will be characteristic of the anticipated mass exodus. People will move away from US services because it makes them feel good, but their destinations are going to be either Five Eyes territory or countries that don't even feel a need to hide their surveillance apparatus.