
Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts - kenmck
https://plus.google.com/u/0/112783391065033208484/posts/16WyAvu37wE
======
patio11
For folks who are headscratching here, back in about 2007 (I remember it
because I was getting into Rails) Joyent's precursor company TextDrive
bootstrapped some hardware purchases by selling a (barely capable of running
Rails, fairly rare for the time) shared hosting account. The kicker was that
you'd pay about ~18 months upfront and it would be Lifetime. I don't trust my
memory for numbers but somewhere between $150 and $300 if I recall correctly.

I actually used them as a hosting provider for a while, and followed the
support forums. Supporting the Lifetime offering was a challenge pretty much
from the getgo, because some folks were less than neighborly with their usage
of system resources, partially out of ignorance, partially out of Rails
playing very poorly with shared systems, and partially because you attract an
_interesting_ type of customer with this offering. The physical hardware had
some faults and probably has not improved much over time.

Meanwhile, shared hosting for Rails is, well, not a very attractive option
over the last couple of years, thanks to VPSes, Heroku, Amazon, etc etc.
Joyent apparently wants to exit the business.

Of note: I remember somebody asking Slicehost to match the business model and
Matt shot them down saying that it was too gimmicky for his taste and wouldn't
be mutually beneficial. Slicehost eventually came up with a neat solution
towards the same end: they were oversubscribed, so they sorted their waiting
list by the amount of non-refundable deposit you were willing to make, giving
them much-needed cash flow without committing them to service for forever.

~~~
holgate
There were actually a number of "VC" phases with TextDrive, starting with the
"VC200" in 2004 that raised $40,000 from 200 pledges of $200 to acquire and
set up the hardware--

[http://photodude.com/2004/06/01/textdrive-or-how-to-
raise-40...](http://photodude.com/2004/06/01/textdrive-or-how-to-
raise-40000-in-4-days)

That was followed by a number of upgrade offerings ("Mixed Grill", "3 Martini
Lunch") in subsequent years, extending into the Joyent merger/acquisition,
that required a larger lump-sum payment.

Their pitch on lifetime service? "How long is it good for? As long as we
exist."

[http://web.archive.org/web/20060202181857/http://textdrive.c...](http://web.archive.org/web/20060202181857/http://textdrive.com/mixedgrill)

Now, you can argue in strictly financial terms that those initial customers
(of whom I'm one) have probably got their money's worth, and that the hosting
landscape has changed sufficiently that the lifetime products are peripheral
to Joyent's main business. The counterargument is that Joyent not only
acquired TextDrive's customers, but the goodwill surrounding Dean Allen's
original venture, and has traded on that goodwill ever since. Clearly, they
feel that's not worth much these days.

Furthermore, giving people who've had eight years of not having to think about
hosting options just 80 days to migrate, with explicit notice that their
servers will be shut down and wiped on October 31, strikes me as pretty cheap.

~~~
_delirium
As far as getting one's money's worth, the "VC-like" pitching makes that odd.
Obviously it wasn't an actual VC arrangement, but it had some similar aspects:
you take a risk by giving $X now to buy a "lifetime account" with some startup
that might be bankrupt next year. In return for helping to fund them and
accepting that downside risk, your potential upside is that if they do succeed
and exist long-term, you get what would in retrospect be below-market-priced
service as a reward for your early support.

It doesn't make much sense to say that, hey, thanks for the "VC" investment
when it was a risk to buy from us, but now that we're successful, you've
gotten your money's worth.

------
nemesisj
"your lifetime service will end on October 31, 2012"

If you're writing that sentence and don't see a problem with it, there's no
helping you. Look, many of us have been there and sold "free" things to early
customers who become a pain later on, but you have to honor it. Better yet,
never sell something "lifetime" without at least some kind of low recurring
fee to cover nominal costs.

~~~
keithpeter
Thank you: just the idea of someone sitting down and typing that phrase in
amazes me. Some kind of token refund and a slightly longer switch-over period
could have turned this into a PR positive.

------
pmb
I paid the extra $$ for lifetime (and did it back when I was a grad student
and had basically zero money) because I didn't want to have to think about
hosting any more. Now I have to think about hosting again. Ugh.

Broken promises leave a bad taste in my mouth.

~~~
pmb
On a related note: where is good for hosting two small websites? I'd like to
be able to log in with SSH and get an actual Unix shell (and not have to pay
too much, as the websites are neither large nor popular).

~~~
RyanMcGreal
I highly recommend Webfaction:

<http://www.webfaction.com?affiliate=hammertime>

Yes, I just shamelessly put in an affiliate link, but the service really is
very good. It's shared hosting but you get SSH, a smart admin panel and very
reasonable prices for your memory. After a few years using it, I'm also happy
to report that their technical support is excellent - timely, helpful and
knowledgeable.

~~~
PuercoPop
What I disliked about webfaction is that the connection is proxied behind an
nginx. But it is true that they have an excellent support. They answer almost
inmediately. Also their Q&A was migrated to a stackexchange clone.

I prefer Linode, a little more expensive but you get decide even your own
distro. (Yay for Archlinux)

------
opendomain
I do not want to be a jerk here, but the only reason I joined was the promise
of "lifetime" - they can NOT just cancel our accounts does it does not suit
them. Please contact me webmaster @ opendomain ORG if you would like to join
the class action lawsuit.

~~~
opendomain
Wow! I have received over a dozen emails in the first hours that want to join
in the lawsuit. We have enough to form an offical class and will be able to
get Joyent to abide by the original terms. Please contact me soon if you want
to participate!

------
michaelhoffman
I wonder why Joyent thinks they can get away with this. "Q: How long is it
good for? A: As long as we exist." seems to be a pretty good definition of
"lifetime." I would think they could only get out of their promise via
bankruptcy. Maybe Joyent is trying to substitute for legal bankruptcy with
moral bankruptcy.

~~~
larrys
"I wonder why Joyent thinks they can get away with this"

"As long as we exist"

Possession is 9/10ths of the law.

Nobody is going to file a private lawsuit to enforce this (assuming there is
even a leg to stand on to enforce it I haven't read the exact contractual
promise..) And the other option would be a class action lawsuit where there
would have to be enough class members to interest an attorney.

(Not relevant in this case but if a company was acquired the new company may
have not acquired all the previous companies legal obligations but simply
setup a new entity and assumed some of the assets, liabilities and obligations
but not everything. When I sold a company that is how it was handled.).

~~~
_delirium
Although it still wouldn't be a cost-effective use of time, a sufficiently
peeved customer could file a small-claims suit for a return of the fee (or
some portion of it).

~~~
larrys
Actually not a bad strategy assuming the venue is convenient.

A corporation has to be defended by an attorney while an individual can be pro
se.

As a result the corporation would typically want to settle rather than spend
money to go to defend in court. My guess is as long as the person filing the
suit didn't blog about it and bring attention to the action beforehand there
would be incentive to settle this out of small claims court. The amount
settled for could easily be the value over time of the "lifetime" benefit. If
the company choose to go to small claims court and lost it would certainly not
be to their benefit as it would show others what was possible and set some
precedent.

Keep in mind that even if the company feels their contract is airtight they
might decide to settle simply to not have to pay legal fees in many cases.

------
zdw
I really like what Joyent is doing with illumos, dtrace, and other similar
projects. That said...

They basically have let their "legacy" customers languish for a while, and
after a pretty bad migration process a year or two ago, it was obvious that
they really wanted to discard these old accounts - those boxes are running a
version of opensolaris that's over 4 years old (snv_67).

Most of us paid quite a bit for our "lifetime" subscriptions, just to have it
ripped up into a bunch of different parts that either get EOL'ed or sold off
to another company (as was done with Strongspace).

~~~
hemancuso
We're still developing Strongspace, and the lifetime subscribers are still
being provided for by Joyent.

~~~
zdw
I'm not faulting Expandrive by any means - you guys are great.

Any intention to EOL the "lifetime" plans on your end?

~~~
hemancuso
Nope. Joyent is working with us to move the lifetime customers to some newer
infrastructure, but they will be taken care of. Lifetime is a somewhat better
story for storage, as you can consolidate 8U of power-hungry X4500 thumpers
using 500GB disks down to a couple U of modern machines with 12x3TB arrays and
a lot of RAM.

------
raganwald
The fairest way to offer "lifetime" or "unlimited" plans is to include a
simple warranty:

"If we ever cancel this plan, we will refund your money in full."

~~~
brey
yup. I'd be suspicious of any "unlimited" plan which didn't offer such a
guarantee - anything that doesn't put its money where its mouth is is just
marketing, a polite euphemism for "lies" in this case.

or time-bound it, so everyone's clear - if I know I'm buying a 10 year plan,
that's fine. I know I'm getting value for money, and the service provider
knows they have a finite projected cost.

~~~
raganwald
The other way to look at it is that the service provider is borrowing money
from you and paying you in services instead of interest. They have the right
to pay the principal of the loan back at any time.

If their cost to provide the service is below the market cost of loaning them
money, the difference is their margin. They simply need to price the "lifetime
service" appropriately such that there's a market demand for it. If the price
the market will pay is too little relative to their cost to provide the
service, then they don't have a viable "lifetime offering."

------
blndcat
In the end shared hosting with Joyent wasn't very good. It was slow, it was
clunky and had an air of neglect. I have one site remaining on it I think.
Most of my sites are on Linode.

What was worse was that Joyent changed directions, decided its then current
customers weren't profitable enough (my guess shared hosting = higher per head
tech support costs) and basically stagnated the service while it introduced
new services. I think they did this a couple of times, and it has always made
me relunctant to recommend them to friends (even ones looking for cloud
services).

 _Sigh_ I hope StrongSpace will still honour the lifetime part.

BTW for readers who think lifetime account holders are being greedy, the point
of the accounts was that when TextDrive/Joyent needed extra capital to expand,
they offered lifetime accounts in return for quite a bit of cash up front. In
part, they are where they are due to this clever bit of fund raising.

~~~
endersshadow
The real issue is, to paraphrase a football player, "What do lifetime mean?"
Is it the lifetime of the product (typical in consumer goods), or was it the
consumer's lifetime (i.e.-until they died)? If it was the consumer's lifetime,
if they had a site where someone died and another person was going to take
over, would we then be upset if Joyent started charging the successor?

Lifetime typically means expected life of the product (see: lifetime
warranties). Death is really, really complicated, so I can't imagine anybody
would actually tie their products to a consumer's death.

~~~
blndcat
If you look at the offer on the waybackmachine:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20060202181857/http://textdrive.c...](http://web.archive.org/web/20060202181857/http://textdrive.com/mixedgrill)

It has this Q&A item: How long is it good for? As long as we exist.

The footer states: a Joyent company

Nothing complicated, Joyent still exists. _shrug_

~~~
endersshadow
Yup, that's pretty cut and dry, and that's what I was looking for, so thanks.
You guys that got hosed by this may have a breach of contract case if you'd
like to take it that far.

------
smackfu
I wonder why they are this dumb. It's like buying bad press. Did they really
think this wouldn't get out and make them a mockery? Would it really cost that
much to continue providing something to these people forever, so they wouldn't
have to say the lifetime is over? Dumb dumb dumb.

------
mikeash
I assume they're giving everybody a refund of their purchase price, right?
...Right?

~~~
howeyc
They should, but probably wont.

If you sell a service, but decide not to provide it you should refund the
money. Judging from the comments most of HN assumes if you "attempt" to
provide the service you can keep the money.

Yes, I get it's a losing proposition for Joyent to live up to their
obligations. So what? You either live up to them, or refund the money, it's
really that simple.

~~~
mikeash
Yeah, the comments seem to be filled with people saying that it's not
practical to provide "lifetime", and people buying it should have known they
didn't mean it anyway.

I look at this the same way I look at "unlimited" internet service. Unlike a
lot of the tech crowd, I have no problem whatsoever with metered bandwidth. My
only quibble is that if you advertise "unlimited" you had better actually
provide unlimited. If you want to charge for overages or enact caps, you don't
get to call it "unlimited".

~~~
smackfu
Personally, I think it's much more likely any random internet companie's life
is a lot shorter than my own.

~~~
SwellJoe
Yet, Joyent still exists.

------
slig
Great, one company less to worry about next time I'm shopping for hosting.

~~~
gaoshan
Seriously. We are looking at hosting right now and are considering Rackspace
and Joyent. In fact, I am one of the lifetime hosting people screwed over by
this move, but this makes it an easy call. No way we are trusting Joyent with
anything.

~~~
troels
Rackspace are amazing. The only gripe I have (which isn't minor, I might add)
is that you can only buy machines in tiers. If you want a machine with high
network throughput (say, like a proxy), you need to purchase lots of cpu, ram
and disk space that you have no need for.

~~~
nthj
Yes, I really like Rackspace. Great customer service! And the tier setup makes
sense to me. It's Smith's Division of Labor principle at play. Sure, it's
technically possible to adjust each feature separately, but you add so much
complexity at every layer that it's a wash economically.

In the same vein, I can buy a Honda Civic for $10K, but a car with custom
specs isn't $12K, it's $some_orders_of_magnitude_more, even if it's equivalent
to a Civic in almost every way.

~~~
troels
I fully agree with that. It's just something to keep in mind before building
on their platform. It's not for me to decide how Rackspace should run their
business, but for me it simply means I can't use them even though I want to.
If only they kept a few "asymmetric" configurations as options, like Amazon
does. But, alas.

------
gaoshan
Joyent just offered me 50% of my original investment back as a payout. Anyone
else hearing this? Might be more lucrative than whatever a class-action
lawsuit would return to each of us.

Might take them up on it as it's better than the hosting deal they are
offering (given that i want nothing to do with them, anyway... dollar for
dollar it seems about equal).

~~~
velcrovan
VC here...How did you get this? Did it come in response to a support ticket?
Did you ask them for a full refund? Is half of your original investment $100
or more like $1000?

~~~
gaoshan
I asked for a full refund. They came back with "half".

~~~
coopdog
Should be more like "triple" or some other multiple, given the risk the early
adopters took. Joyent used that capital and expanded it many, many times.

------
patrickgzill
Seems a little odd, surely with the cheaper RAM, far more powerful CPUs and
inexpensive disks these days, they could spend a few $$$ and burn a couple of
U , keeping their customers happy?

I don't know how many servers they would have needed in 2007 to provide the
services they sold, but surely now they could consolidate all those users onto
1/4 the machines?

What is this negative press costing them?

~~~
wmf
I think the real issue is that Joyent no longer provides any form of shared
hosting and they don't want to. So they have no equivalent service to migrate
the old lifetime customers to. They'd probably lose quite a bit of money if
they migrate lifetime customers to their cloud.

~~~
slig
I bet they're going to lose more in bad PR. People here usually do not forget
fuck ups.

------
obiefernandez
Here's the answer you'll get if you write to their support complaining about
the change:

Hi Obie,

As often happens in the software business, vendors “end of life” older
platforms and migrate customers to new versions or platforms. The service you
purchased a “lifetime subscription” to will no longer be supported or
available from Joyent. On the other hand, we appreciate and value your
business as an early customer. As such, we have created special offers
specifically for you to make this transition as easy as possible. Details and
promo codes were provided to you in the email.

I hope you will be able to take us up on the offer and see the benefits of our
new platform.

Thanks,

\------------------ Peter Yorke Senior Solutions Architect JoyentCloud.com

~~~
holgate
That's the boilerplate that the support desk is sending out to everyone.

I suppose the question to ask is this: "Were you lying back in 2006 when you
said the offer was good '[a]s long as we exist', or are you lying now? Or did
you decide to renege on your promise somewhere in-between?"

You'll get the same boilerplate response, but it'll be on record.

~~~
falava
I have obtained 50% refund from the support desk by replying to the sunset
email and asking for it.

This morning I found this Jason Hoffman post about the EOL and a possible
refund here and added to my response email:
<http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=240955#p240955>

In my case and theirs, I consider this partial refund ok because I have been
using his service 8 years and now I will move my small sites to a cheaper
host.

------
typicalrunt
As annoyed as I am with all of it, I'm more interested to know how to move off
of their products and services now.

My lifetime account is where I have several important email servers, and I
don't know how to migrate them. All the email says is to contact Joyent about
getting migrated to one of their other product offerings. However, if I am
only given 2.5 months to sort all this stuff out, I DO NOT WANT to use Joyent
services. I'd love to use GMail for Business, Linode or what have you, but I
don't know where to start.

~~~
tracker1
I tend to just use an IMAP mail client (like thunderbird) connect the old
server, and new server, then copy from one to the other... this doesn't take
care of multiple users and their accounts/passwords though.

------
buntar
Dear Joyent

You got me:

"We've been analyzing customer usage of Joyent’s systems and noticed that you
are one of the few customers that are still on our early products and have not
migrated to our new platform, the Joyent Cloud."

So sorry about not appreciating enough your new platform because " Everyone
that’s moved to our new cloud infrastructure has been pleased with the
results".

About the whole "lifetime" ("As long as we exist.") thing ... Stupid me. I
never get that. I mean that was meant metaphorically, right, like in
marriages?

Ok then, you divorced me. Thanks that I can still sleep under your roof for
one and a half month.

And yes: You keep the house. And the money. I keep my files.

I think, we can call this a true a win-win situation. Sorry, I mean "win-win".

Sincerely.

~~~
phearlez
Two and a half months, actually. Which is still a lot less than the lifetime
we were promised (unless you're a fruitfly or something, I guess) but you have
a little longer to migrate your stuff.

------
timkeller
> "...and noticed that you are one of the few customers that are still on our
> early products..."

One of the few? Cool. It's not costing you that much to keep them on their
lifetime plan. Surely its not worth the negative PR?

Not sure what Joyent is thinking.

~~~
gaoshan
They try to make it seem like we are a couple of dozen duffers who never
really use the service anyway. What a gimmick.

------
joshe
Had an account with them back around then because their site made them seem
technically proficient, but dealing with their customer service was like
dealing with bad sys admins - grudging help and lazy. There were also a lot of
unfinished nooks and crannies in their system. An overall lack of
craftsmanship and care. The email brought back not so fond memories and is
indicative of their attitude in all their interactions. Partly you are paying
for company culture and theirs is not good.

------
prodigal_erik
This was the same service that had an outage last year which took over two
days to recover from, for which their answer was basically "what did you
expect, we're neglecting that server"? Sad thing is, putting the bottom line
before responsibility is probably an effective strategy because the market
does not penalize it sufficiently.

~~~
graue
Funny you mention that. My server with them (shared hosting, lifetime account)
just had a two-day outage Monday through Wednesday and still isn't totally
recovered.

------
cletus
It never ceases to amaze me how many people "fall" for this "lifetime" pricing
model. In fact I said the exact same thing three months ago [1].

The fact that the service provider is not getting any future revenue from you,
even if they've fairly discounted your lifetime value, gives them the
incentive to get rid of you.

Additionally it gives the wrong incentives to users to "abuse" their
"unlimited" service. You saw this with AT&T's "unlimited" wireless data plans
recently [2].

I know why people do it: as an alternative to raising capital. Businesses do
Groupons for the same reason. In fact, I'm feeling like a broken record here
[3].

The problem with Groupon (and similar "offer" sites) is they create the wrong
incentives and attract the worst kind of customer. The best situation for
Groupon and for businesses is for lots of people to buy the offers and then
not to use them.

The lesson here is that if you want to create a sustainable and _liked_
business, you need to align your incentives with those of your customers [4].

As a customer, stop falling for this charade.

As a business, stop taking short term cash flows for _perpetual_ liabilities
just to raise capital.

Seriously.

EDIT: regarding "unlimited" (in Karunamon's comment), he is correct: we do
need to hold companies to a higher standard. For example, Australia's ACCC (I
guess equivalent to the FTC but with a heavy focus on consumer rights) has
cracked down on the use of "unlimited" (eg [5]).

But that just reinforces my point. In Australia pretty much all Internet plans
have stated quotas. With unlimited plans you create the wrong incentives to
throttle users, impose nebulous "fair use" conditions and generally whittle
away at what's really "unlimited".

It's the wrong incentive system.

With Internet quotas at least you know you're getting what you pay for and
your plan is priced for your usage, not some median or 95% usage that will
constantly have the provider trying to throttle "power users".

[1]: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3936701>

[2]: <http://mashable.com/2012/03/01/att-limits-unlimited-data/>

[3]: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2649739>

[4]: [http://www.accountingweb.com/blogs/ronaldbaker/firms-
future/...](http://www.accountingweb.com/blogs/ronaldbaker/firms-
future/incentives-matter)

[5]: [http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2010/12/accc-taking-tpg-to-
cour...](http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2010/12/accc-taking-tpg-to-court-over-
unlimited-plans/)

~~~
drewmclellan
I was one of the original 200 to back TextDrive in with the VC200 accounts.
The risk, of course, was that the venture wouldn't be successful and we'd be
laying out $200 for less than $200 worth of hosting. If they were successful,
$200 would buy a reasonable shared hosting account for life.

Far from being naive and "falling" for the pricing model, my assessment was
that

1) 200 shared hosting accounts (one server?) is a completely plausible
lifetime offering for a successful hosting company, 2) $200 is a low risk
punt, and 3) these are good guys and I think they can realistically make a go
of it

TextDrive was a success, now continues to be a success as Joyent, and 200
shared hosting accounts (the state of play when I signed up) should be trivial
for them to provide - even if they outsource that obligation to another
provider.

I know I wasn't wrong about them being good guys (they are), but that's why
I'm bewildered by today's announcement.

It may not be economically viable for them to provide these services now, but
it wasn't economically viable for them to start a hosting company until we
backed it. That was the deal. Joyent has an obligation to keep these services
online, and if that means they need to take a bit of a hit to do that, then
that's what they need to do.

Otherwise, I'm unclear how anyone would trust them again.

~~~
Isofarro
I'm guessing from <http://textusers.com/wiki/VC200> this $200 hosting offer
was in 2004, eight years ago. $200 up-front comes to a bit above $2 a month.

In 2004, shared hosting with PHP/MySQL was the standard hosting package. A
good quality Cpanel account at that time was about $15-$20 per month. So
you've gotten an exceptionally good deal.

Around that time Dreamhost became the place to be. quickly followed by a
series of lengthy outages that utterly destroyed it's reputation. Other
Cpanel-powered hosts popped up, went under, merged, acquired, disappeared,
reappeared, went down, never came back out.

Fast-forward to today, shared hosting is just a race-to-the-bottom barrel
scraping. Margins are practically non-existent. Every kid with a bedroom
computer has their own Reseller account and pretend they have their own
hosting company. Pricing on that seems to be about $4 a year, but the quality
is absolutely dire, and that's when the server is actually online.

Shared hosting is largely a dead industry today, it bottom-feeds because their
top-end audience grew into dedicated servers, and their average and above
average end customers are comfortable running their own cheap VPS. Safe in the
knowledge that it's very much harder for another customer to take down
everyone's website.

Shared hosting is no longer a sustainable business model. You got a great ride
for your money, you got a very good deal. Now it's time to move on.

Grab yourself a VPS, and take a step up to the next curve on the online
hosting technology stack. It's well past time. Good quality shared hosting,
with great support is getting more and more expensive, because the market for
it is dwindling down to people who can't or won't take the step up towards
VPS/Dedicated servers - that means the support cost per customer rises. And
that isn't a sustainable process.

If the average monthly price you paid for good quality hosting on
TextDrive/Joyent is under $10 because of these packages, well done, you got a
tremendously good deal. How would you have rated the service you received
before you received the email/message? Think about that - consider if the
support/service you received related to the per month price you've paid.

Now go out and find a web hosting offer that will give you the same quality of
service, for the same monthly price - and switch to that. I get a feeling,
apart from special offers that will surface because of this, you'll be hard-
pressed to find an equivalent.

But seriously people, "lifetime" and "unlimited" are the two emptiest words in
the language of web resource offers. You know that. I'd feel sad for you if
you only got 1 years hosting for your $200 for such features.

But if you got 8 years for your initial outlay, and you still feel you deserve
more... that's a text-book example of bottom-feeding. Quite the sort of
customer a web hosting company wouldn't miss.

A class action? That would be amusing.

~~~
dasil003
A few corrections.

Dreamhost isn't and wasn't ever cPanel. It got hot back in '01 / '02. The
outages in 2004 weren't lengthy, were mostly DoS and got blown way out of
proportion by people who thought $10/month was a kingly sum that entitled them
to dedicated-server quality. The quality of Dreamhost's shared hosting hasn't
really diminished over the years and it's still perfectly adequate for low
traffic PHP or even Rails sites.

TextDrive by contrast was founded on the principle of combatting the race to
the bottom by charging a fair price and offering unparalleled power and
flexibility. This vision was sold to us by Dean Allen who had an enormously
positive reputation as one of the very best early bloggers. Funding TextDrive
with these lifetime accounts was not just us chumps buying into some bottom-
feeders marketing scam. There was real intention and integrity behind this.

The problem was that they couldn't actually deliver this quality service
despite charging a lot more for it. I mean there was flexibility (webmin
instead of cpanel, etc), and TextDrive was the first shared host supporting
Ruby on Rails (in fact it was the "official" rails host for a while), and they
were always working on awesome new tech (huge Solaris boxes, ZFS, bla bla
bla). But in the end, Jason Hoffman did not know how to build a stable hosting
service.

Eventually after the Joyent acquisition/merger I think they figured out how to
run a business, but it was _our_ money that allowed them the time to learn how
to do that. The actual experience of hosting with TextDrive was always shit,
and it never cease to amaze me how many hours Jason Hoffman spent posting in
the forums when there was obviously a lot of urgent work that needed to be
done.

At some point in the early history, Dean Allen went dark and largely
disappeared from public view. You'll notice that now Jason Hoffman is the
Founder and there's no mention of Dean Allen, but if I recall, it was
definitely a partnership, with Dean bringing the name recognition and web
experience, and Jason providing the system architecture (business/technical
co-founders if you will). I don't have any inside information about what
happened there, but I do know that Jason Hoffman and Joyent burnt their bridge
with me and I'll never trust anything they do.

If there's a class action lawsuit I'm in.

~~~
Isofarro
"TextDrive by contrast was founded on the principle of combatting the race to
the bottom by charging a fair price and offering unparalleled power and
flexibility. This vision was sold to us by Dean Allen who had an enormously
positive reputation as one of the very best early bloggers. Funding TextDrive
with these lifetime accounts was not just us chumps buying into some bottom-
feeders marketing scam. There was real intention and integrity behind this."

* principle over actual experience

* a blogger over someone with actual knowledge and technical expertise

* an undefined "fair price"

* an expectation that comfortably exceeds the current delivery levels

* intention and integrity

And what you ended up with is a typical shared hosting company experience, one
that lasted a whole lot longer than a large number of other web hosts.

I can't help but feel that a large number of people would be happier if Joyent
went down in a big ball of flames suddenly, rather than an orderly and planned
60-plus day notice of a shutdown of their service, in favour of focusing more
on a better and more sustainable business model.

Businesses grow, industries grow and change. There's not much of a sustainable
business in shared-hosting, the margins are too razor-thin got that, the
middle and top end has been chomped off by affordable VPS offerings. Lifers
seem appalled they are effectively paying the same price as everyone else.

The rest of your post seems to be on a personal crusade against the technical
"co-founder". Why not the original blogger co-founder who promised a service
he could not work with someone to deliver?

~~~
dasil003
It was anything but typical. Seriously, you shouldn't comment on it as if all
your stereotypes perfectly explain everything. They don't. You weren't there.

Regarding Dean Allen, I have no beef with him, because A) he wasn't in the
forum daily talking about all the awesome stuff they were doing that never
actually panned out for years on end and B) I suspect he disagreed with the
way the company was being run (the instability, the poor customer service) and
either was forced out or left of his own volition. But either way it would be
bad form for him to air his dirty laundry, so I give him the benefit of the
doubt.

Also FWIW, I'm not on a crusade at all. I haven't thought about TextDrive or
Joyent for years. I've written them off. But I do see it as a public service
to make my opinion of Jason Hoffman's integrity known.

------
grandalf
I've been warning people about Joyent for a few years now. A few years back I
was using them for some hosting and they were dishonest about their shared
filesystem issues.

------
officemonkey
The fact that I got a good deal for hosting in retrospect is irrelevant.
Joyent offered lifetime service in exchange for a large payment up front. It
wasn't just a one time deal they regretted. They made lifetime offers on
numerous occasions. It was their business model at the time, no one forced
them.

Here's a very easy solution for Joyent.

Refund my money. My payment was for lifetime service. Pay me back and we'll
call it quits.

------
danyork
Joyent seems to be doing some general housecleaning... I received a similar
notice (same first paragraphs) related to the closure of their <http://no.de/>
Node.js hosting service:

\----

Joyent is retiring the No.de service. If, as a Node.js developer, you prefer a
Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, we suggest that you consider our third-
party partner, Nodejitsu, who offers a Node.js PaaS that runs on Joyent.
Joyent continues to provide an ideal cloud infrastructure to run your Node.js
applications, with performance and debugging tools that no other cloud
provides. Sign up for a free trial on Nodejitsu (www.nodejitsu.com) or take
advantage of Joyent Cloud's 30-Day Free Trial using this promotional code.

\----

------
ck2
Every company that offers "lifetime" anything, seems to mean their lifetime,
not yours.

I once had a lifetime free checking account, I still have the advertising
flyers from when I got it.

Well they took that away from me last year too.

I guess they just count on you getting a lawyer and lawsuit being more of a
hassle than you just walking away.

------
NateEag
I'm another Mixed Grill customer, currently on a shared Solaris box.

When I bought it, I knew it was a gamble, and with the $500 spread over 6.5ish
years, it's not a terrible ROI.

I assumed I'd lose out due to the company eventually folding, though. "As long
as we exist" seemed pretty straightforward, and what I knew about them didn't
leave me believing that they'd just pull the plug like this.

I've updated their Wikipedia page with a short section that I believe
summarizes the situation accurately and factually, without letting my emotions
creep in too much - if anyone cares to edit it, have at it.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Joyent>

Joyent, I'm disappointed. You had a few memorable tech disasters, but never
before did I personally experience ill will from you. I had begun to trust you
guys.

------
po
Looks like Jason Hoffman has stepped into the forums to explain the reasoning
behind their decision and do some damage control:

<http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=240955#p240955>

They probably should have done that on the original letter.

------
sp332
Someone already started a Google group for people to discuss where to move
their hosting: <https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ex-joyeurs>

------
NateEag
For anyone who's interested, a "Money back or five free years of your own
virtual server" offer has been posted by Jason Hoffman:
<http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?id=33682>

It doesn't come close to honoring the "as long as we exist" that we bought in
for, but it's a lot better than the starting position, and Jason is talking a
little about why we're being cut.

(From what I can see, it looks like cutting the lifers may have been a
requirement of some of the recent VC investors. That's me reading between the
lines a bit, though.)

------
michaelbuckbee
This actually seems fairly typical for most free or lifetime plans for things.
Are there counterexamples of site/services that offered lifetime access that
are still doing so 5 years later?

~~~
smackfu
Tivo has Lifetime subscriptions, where the lifetime is of the hardware but
they transfer if you sell the hardware. They aren't always selling them as an
option, but they always honor them, and have been for 10+ years.

~~~
gadders
I had one of the original Tivos in the UK, and I bought a lifetime
subscription.

They ended this service in
2011.<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiVo#United_Kingdom>

They no longer honour this deal in UK (which sucks, because I loved it).

~~~
smackfu
Yeah, not much you can do about the service ending.

------
justinhj
This reminds me I bought a lifetime license for Visual Studio in the 90's.
Less than a year later they revoked it ans esent q cheque for $50 and a copy
of Visual Java

------
btipling
Split the company in two, one with lifetime accounts one without. One with
lifetime accounts goes bankrupt immediately. Promise kept, goals achieved!

------
port_rhombus
Seriously though, the printout I have from March 29, 2006 of their Mixed Grill
offer says "One-time payment of $499" and "How long is it good for? As long as
we exist."

That constitutes a contract which they are clearly trying very hard to ignore.
It seems so petty given their success, available resources, and the very
manageable limited bandwidth and quota'd storage space us lifetime customers
are allocated.

------
quangv
I think lifetime should mean lifetime.

They should of given you at least 15 years free I think.

~~~
masterzora
It appears that lifetime means lifetime of the product rather than lifetime of
the customer. Is anyone really that surprised?

~~~
jessriedel
According to michaelhoffman, the FAQ said this: "Q: How long is it good for?
A: As long as we exist."

Seems pretty clear cut to me.

(Not sure this is accurate, though. I did find it repeated in a forum
discussing Joyent in 2006.)

~~~
michaelhoffman
Linked from other comments in this thread:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20060202181857/http://textdrive.c...](http://web.archive.org/web/20060202181857/http://textdrive.com/mixedgrill)

------
rdl
Wow. Either Joyent is financially doomed on its own (and is trying to cut
costs), or is just really stupid.

EOLing an old lifetime product with high support costs makes sense. What they
should have done was moved the "small number of customers" using Lifetime
service onto a new lifetime platform using their shared hosting platform. The
plan they're offering for a year seems like an adequate replacement -- the
cost of providing that low tier of service forever is probably not much more
than the cost of providing it for a year.

Maybe make it opt-in, so inactive accounts don't spin up on the new platform,
and provide some higher level of service at a discount (so, instead of a
$50/yr cloud plan for free, you could optionally get a $250/yr plan for
$150/yr.)

------
thirdstation
They did the same for their perpetually paying customers too. When I signed up
for my TextDrive account it was billed as one price ($10/month) forever. Then
Joyent bought them and things were OK for a while but I figured that was the
end of my price guarantee.

My biggest issue with Joyent is they seem to change their services every year
or two while letting their legacy customers languish. I used to have an
account on a shared host. Now I have a Smart Machine, or maybe a Shared
Accelerator. I'm not sure anymore and they keep changing the support website.

Now I just use them for mail but, I'm dissatisfied with that so I'm looking to
move.

What I want is to pay for a service and not worry about it. It's too much work
being their customer nowadays.

------
tomjen3
Class action law suit?

------
robinbowes
Much suckage. Lifetime means lifetime. It wouldn't be too much out of the way
to provide a small host for "lifetime" users. I have complained to joyent.

------
cct
This is fraud, no contest. The real question is what's the best way to deal
with it. 1. Social pressure to re-instate equivalent service (1.5gb for me) 2.
numerous small claims court applications (full refund + migration
costs/damages) 3. Class action (similar to above).

To make any of them work to full effect, we'd probably have to band together?
Any argument as to which method is preferred? CCT

------
joevandyk
I believe I also have a "lifetime" account, I have not received this email.
Though I did switch over to the solaris machines a few years ago.

~~~
hboon
I received the email. Felt unpleasant. It wasn't much financially, just the
feeling that it is wrong.

------
ljoshua
TextDrive was a great host back in the day (I signed up around 2004) and I was
also happy with Joyent as well. They've obviously changed target markets since
then, which is unfortunate, but I think the offer they made is certainly
palatable and a sign of good will. All good things must come to an end, and
then you go on to the next good company.

------
falava
If you are a VC/MG/3ML like me, I think you can ask support for a partial
refund. I did it, now let's see...

Jason Hoffman says that and other interesting things about the EOL here (read
all of his posts):

<http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=240955#p240955>

------
TomGullen
Had a similar experience with an old host, promised "lifetime price freeze". A
couple of years later they started charging me more as they had 'moved me to a
new server' which I fiercely contested. In the end we settled for a
compromise.

~~~
Dylan16807
Ridiculous, since the reason to get a new server is that it's cheaper per
cycle/byte/watt.

------
blues
"There's a sucker born every minute" -- usually attributed to P. T. Barnum.
The people who got sucked into buying into this "Joyent ending ‘lifetime’
hosting accounts" hustle probably got the greatest bargain of their lives.
I'll bet they were mostly young folks, ever chasing after that proverbial pot
of gold at the end of the rainbow (although some never quit). Hoping for
endless service with no further incentive for the provider. What a priceless
lesson at such a small cost! This company has actually taught one of life's
great lessons for a truly paltry sum!

Anyway, here's what I do: I register my domains at nearlyfreespeech.net. They
have a somewhat limited number of different TLDs available, and at about $9
per year, are not cheap (or "free"), but certainly not exorbitant. But their
integrity is rock-solid. One time I let my domain expire for a couple weeks,
an alarming circumstance. But they restored it for free after I simply payed
the fee (this can only work for a limited time, of course). My old (and
reliable) previous host and registrar would have charged me about $200 to get
it back! So the $9 is like cheap insurance.

I use asmallorange.com as my host. They charge as little as $35 per YEAR, with
$0.50 per GB per month for additional bandwidth. (Both of these hosts are "pay
as you go.") So if I ever have a disagreement with my host, they cannot mess
with my domain name! Also, my registrar uses FreeBSD servers, while my host
uses Linux, and I don’t want to deal with FreeBSD (it’s probably more stable
than Linux, but I know nothing about how to use it). The smallorange service
(running on Linux) is chock-full of great features, including Cpanel. They
have a feature inside their Cpanel that one-click installs things like
WordPress, and I used it. But I chose a one-click install password that it
allowed, but that the rest of Cpanel would not allow, and that lead to
problems. But their customer service was right there for me, and they
immediately cleared it up. Hope this doesn't sound spammy. The main point is,
if you really want service, pay as you go is the way to get it. It worked
great for me.

------
OliverM
I thought I'd switched over to Solaris hosting, but still got the email??

------
ksec
They could have just refund ALL of those money as credits for JoyentCloud.
Would this be a better solution?

So you essentially got "x" years of hosting plus Those money back as credits.

------
fingerprinter
I have quite a few static sites on them right now (personal, friends and
family). Looking for a reasonable host that won't cost a bunch. Any
recommendations?

------
robinbowes
BTW, I too have moved to the Solaris hosting.

------
mgrimes
My two cents: <http://stateful.net/joyent-refugee/>

------
forgotAgain
To anyone thinking of Joyent for cloud services: Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, ...

------
tomson
Outraged, too. Any suitable alternatives in sight?

------
tomson
Where is Dean Allen now that we need him?

~~~
keithpeter
He seems to have disappeared, apart from sporadic tweets. A quieter version of
Mark Pilgrim and _why?.

Is this normal for successful Web entrepreneurs?

------
gexla
Dear Jones, we said "till death do us part" but you are now divorcing me. :(

In case you didn't get it, Jones is the name of the shared server that I'm on.
;)

------
gexla
Mixed Griller here. I don't remember what the language was, but perhaps in
this case "lifetime" meant the lifetime of the product, shared hosting.
Personally, I'm happy with the accelerator, I never did like shared hosting
and quit using it a long time ago except for a couple of sites that are
gathering dust.

~~~
ceejayoz
[http://web.archive.org/web/20060203030930/http://www.textdri...](http://web.archive.org/web/20060203030930/http://www.textdrive.com/mixedgrill)

Q: How long is it good for? A: As long as we exist.

~~~
stock_toaster
Didn't they cease to exist when they were acquired?

~~~
blndcat
see footer of the page. They (TextDrive) were already acquired at the time of
the offer.

~~~
stock_toaster
Aha. That would indeed make a difference. ;) Thanks.

~~~
justin66
It doesn't, really. Being acquired wouldn't ordinarily relieve them of a
contractual obligation. (Bankruptcy would.)

