
TextDrive is Back - zdw
http://joyent.com/migration/
======
tijs
A story of corporate communication amateur hour; So i have to read on HN that
my textdrive/joyent hosting is stopping. Bit pissed i write an email to
support that i'd like more time to move stuff and that a refund would be nice.
I get a canned reply with a repeat of the email mentioned on HN. Then on their
support forums the Joyent president suddenly is all helpful and grants
everyone refunds. we'll have to ask/haggle with support about it though. So i
email support again quoting their fearless leader. This time the support staff
promptly grants me a refund (which i haven't heard or seen anything about
since i should add). I'm happy enough with that outcome for now though and
start moving all my sites to other hosting options. Fast forward to today
(about a week later). Again on HN (still not on that mailing list it seems) i
have to read that textdrive is restarting after all (tada!) and we can keep
our precious hosting accounts running. Wow, thanks good timing as well. Can i
still get my refund and get the f out though?

Note to budding entrepreneurs; don't do this.

~~~
mattdw
I requested that they honor the refund offer (as I'd already started migrating
away, and as they've destroyed any remaining trust I had in them.) I just
received the reply:

 _We are sorry for the inconvenience our change in plans has caused. This is
the only option available. We will continue to honor your original Lifetime
purchase, and you will continue to receive hosting services from TextDrive._

So, no, we can't get our refunds and get the f out. I'm deeply unhappy with
how they've handled this, start to end. (I too failed to receive any of the
mass mail-outs.)

~~~
benatkin
Yeah this isn't going well:
<http://forum.textdrive.com/viewtopic.php?pid=242571>

------
motoford
Someone please correct me if I am wrong, but by relaunching as a separate
company from Joyent, it opens up the ability to truly shut down the service
and avoid all of the lawsuits.

Remember that the key wording was "as long as the company exists". Once the
spinoff is complete, TextDrive can be shut down while Joyent continues on.

Perhaps I am too cynical, but I see no other reason to jump through all of
these hoops and separate.

~~~
jeremyjh
I don't think this was ever about Joyent wanting to escape their lifetime
hosting obligation. It was more about them not wanting to be in the shared
hosting business - they don't want to do that work. They still don't want to
be in that business, but they old founder has offered to come back and do it.
All it will cost them is a little money, which is not so much when they think
of all the damage this publicity could cause their business in years to come.

~~~
eli
Sure, but all it was really costing them in the first place was infrastructure
and support costs.

Is the new Textdrive supposed to be financially self-sufficient? That doesn't
seem possibly. Even if Joyent gives them all the hardware and bandwidth for
free, who is going to pay for the support and maintenance? The handful of
paying shared hosting customers?

~~~
jeremyjh
Obviously they will have to build a real business. They will have the
incentive to do it this way though.

~~~
eli
Fair enough, but it seems like it would be hard to build a shared hosting
business even without having to support a bunch of non-paying customers from
day 1.

------
jimm
I already finished migrating off of my TD lifetime account and onto
WebFaction. I don't see why I should put my sites back on TD. So I guess my TD
lifetime account is a spare, for now. I'm sort of glad to hear they're doing
the right thing, but they did it the wrong way.

------
typicalrunt
I wonder what this means to the 5-year hosting or full refund offer given to
lifetime account holders.

I submitted it here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4410682>

~~~
mattdw
It means those offers have been withdrawn. They are no longer an available
option. (I just heard back from support.)

~~~
__chrismc
I was told different, by support. I could chose between the 5 year offer, or
TextDrive.

Reading the forum thread, the refund _has_ been withdrawn - which is a really
crappy thing to do to the people who had already accepted that offer.

------
opendomain
While I would like to beleive that they will fix all the problems, my
previouse experience with Joyent tells me that this may be an attempt to try
to get away from the a lawsuit.

I posted a coment here two weeks ago [1] and I received dozens of responses -
if anyone would like to join the class action to ensure our rights are not
lost please conact me. I am not really interested in lawyers - I hope we can
work something out.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4392052>

~~~
eli
Im not defending the ridiculous path they took to get here, but how could you
have grounds for a lawsuit now that they are holding up their end of the
original bargain?

------
kbd
Here's the e-mail that was sent out:

[Name],

If we haven't met, I'm Dean Allen, a founder of TextDrive, the shared hosting
company started by Jason Hoffman and me in 2004. I'm also a founder and
erstwhile President of Joyent, which some time ago merged with TextDrive,
though I haven't been active with that company for a while.

If we have met, I hope it went okay.

A couple of weeks ago I received, at the same time as Joyent’s shared hosting
customers, a message announcing an end to support for shared hosting,
affecting customers who’ve been with us for years, some of whom invested in
accounts we had intended to support for the rest of the life of the company.
The announcement struck many as abrupt. Some took it to be an abandonment of,
if not an insult to, your good faith, written in marketing and lawyer speak.

I soon spoke with my friend Jason, who by then was deluged with abusive emails
and imaginative threats. After I rubbed some salt in his wounds, we began
imagining what it would take to continue providing what we'd intended all
along to those who put their faith in us. After some wrangling, we’ve found a
way to make it work.

I’d like to announce that on November 1st, 2012, TextDrive will relaunch anew
as a separate hosting company, staffed and funded, run by me. Please consider
the recently announced end-of-life for Joyent’s shared hosting customers now
revised to be a continuation-of-life, to be carried out in the same friendly,
creative, publishing-centered spirit of TextDrive’s early days.

No matter its humble beginnings, Joyent now operates in a very big arena,
producing heavy artillery for the armies of cloud computing, and it's been
years since the company has been structured to service the retail hosting
customer. Moreover, the servers on which your accounts still reside are old,
slow, inefficient, and they go down on occasion. Everyone deserves better.

Current shared hosting customers can expect to have at least double the
resources provisioned have now, running on vastly more stable and efficient
infrastructure. Running, in fact, on the very heavy artillery mentioned above.

I intend to have all current paying and lifetime shared hosting customers
moved from our old data centers to new, modern and efficient infrastructure by
November 1. We'll be doing all we can to automate the migration process and
keep discomfort at bay. More communications and instructions on the migration
process will follow. For now, know that Joyent shared hosting customers,
whether paid or lifetime, are now TextDrive customers and that service will
not be interrupted.

For updates and resources click here [the page linked by the OP].

It gives me great pleasure to indicate that I’ll talk to you soon.

Dean Allen

TextDrive

Edit: Here's the previous HN thread discussing this:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4391669>

~~~
dasil003
I wish I had received this email, I think I missed out on one of the
migrations at some point and I dropped off the list, but I re-added myself
now.

It really makes me feel happy to see Dean to come out of the woodwork and
handle this. I'm sure there's a million things he'd rather do than be involved
in web hosting anymore, but he obviously felt some obligation to all of us who
believed in his vision 8 years ago, and that more than makes up for a thousand
what'd-you-expect-from-shared-hosting-you-idiot comments on HN and elsewhere.

------
benatkin
I choose to give them the benefit of the doubt. Both TextDrive and Joyent
Cloud have been highly productive enterprises. I hated to see TextDrive fall
by the wayside but I still trust them more than a run-of-the-mill exit-seeking
startup. I hope the new TextDrive makes money and is around for a long time.

------
alpb
What was it used to do? Can somebody tell, please?

~~~
d4mi3n
IIRC it was originally a shared web host. I think they also had a gimmicky
lifetime subscription if you pre-paid for a year's worth of service.

~~~
gry
The lifetime subscription was designed to fund TextDrive as a nascent company.

[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)

~~~
motoford
Thank you for posting that link, it adds a lot more depth to this story --
Anyone not familiar with the TextDrive lifetime subscription needs to read
this.

