
MyRedis acquired by Garantia Data, gives customers 3 days to move off - m0th87
https://myredis.com/
======
richardv
Some companies just don't understand how to write acquisition/winding down
letters.

"We're excited" should almost never be used in an acquisition post unless the
users also have something genuinely to be excited about. ie. Cookies, Balloons
and otherwise exciting things!

Instead, what they wrote is:

> We're excited to be acquired, thanks for making this possible, now GTFO our
> servers in the next three days.

(Also on another note, couldn't you replicate their entire business in a
weekend using Docker, vanilla Redis, and the boto python API?)

\--------

Edit: (Since this is the top comment, I'll paste the comment from the founder
who is hellbanned).

\--------

    
    
        Hey, I'm Miles Smith, the Founder of MyRedis. I sent the email this morning
        and didn't read it through the eyes of my customers. I take ownership of
        that. We have updated our website, and sent a followup email to all 
        customers, to clarify the availability of customer data.
    
        All customer instances and data will be fully online and operational until at 
        least July 30th.
        Furthermore, I will be storing an archive of all customer data for 
        an additional 90 days,
        just in case someone missed something.
        I will be available to help all customers who would like assistance in migrating.
    
        Miles Smith Founder, MyRedis

\-----

(Miles you are hellbanned. No one can see your comments from your current
account)

~~~
mraaaaa
the team page on the website changed in the last few days to remove the other
owner it looks like abandonment of the company so they probably dont care
about what people think

~~~
RyanZAG
Reply from miles:

    
    
      Actually, it's been a struggle for me. I've gone through two co-founders,
      who, in their own ways, just didn't work out. Who knows, maybe it's me. 
      All I DO know is that my customers were starting to be affected by it, 
      so I had to do something.
      The entire reason for this acquisition was for the customers. 
      They need someone who can take care of them like they deserve.

~~~
aneth4
> The entire reason for this acquisition was for the customers.

That's just obviously not true.

How does this acquisition in any way help customers?

The resolution offered is to migrate manually to Redis Cloud, something
customers could do regardless.

Seems the acquisition resulted in the service being shut down far more
abruptly than otherwise, unless the situation was so bad they couldn't afford
a few more weeks of hosting.

~~~
miles-myredis
I posted a more in depth response in this thread, but the short of it is this.

1\. I'd tried finding new people to help with the increased workload of new
customers. Everyone I found failed, causing me months of setbacks while I did
2x the workload, and then tried to train a new person on the stack.

2\. I've been funding this completely out of my own pocket. No VC money, or
even buddy money. After the most recent co-founder being arrested, I had to
make a decision. Either my customers suffer, or my family suffers. Since I was
unwilling to have either of those out comes, the only logical (yet painful)
solution was to have a company with the proper resources and expertise take
over.

~~~
sgrove
While I was initially disappointed in what seemed like irresponsible post-
acquisition behavior after reading the linkbait title, after knowing what kind
of a situation you were in, it makes a ton of sense. Don't worry about the
ridiculous critics in the crowd, it's a very different world when you're in
the thick of a failing startup with people/family depending on you.

This seems like the most responsible action you could have taken, and is a
noble way of handling your customers' trust. The option to migrate anyone who
asks but to encourage developers who know what they're doing to do it
themselves is similarly appropriate.

The only seemingly missing piece is a longer notification window.

Sorry for the rough ride of a failing company, but well done for handling the
transition appropriately.

~~~
miles-myredis
The really crappy part was, the traction was starting to pick up this last
month. :(

------
aneth4
So they are aquiring a company composed of: 1) brand goodwill 2) customers 3)
technology 4) employees

Apparently the first two were not worth much and it was even more valuable to
create significant negative reputation for Redis Cloud by damaging both. The
third is clearly not useful since Redis Cloud is already the "most advanced."
Employees, well, they better have a good pay package to stick around after
that demoralizing hit.

We can safely put Garantia in the category of "couldn't care less about
customers."

~~~
technotony
Maybe it was just an acquihire? Must have been if they care this little about
their product/customers...

~~~
jharrison
Giving only three days and offering to assist with transfers could also point
to the possibility that they really don't have that many paying customers to
begin with.

------
miles-myredis
I'm not quite sure why I was hellbanned. I guess that's the point of it
though.

I want to apologize to everyone who was affected by this. MyRedis was my first
SaaS, and it was a learning experience in many ways (and continues to be,
apparently).

I have adjusted the shutdown dates to give everyone more time.

On a personal note, here's a brief backstory to explain how I got here:

I started MyRedis as a technical co-founder almost a year ago. Since then, two
other people have filled the other co-founder role. One decided to move to NZ
one day without notifying me, and start working for some "dream job" company.
The other, as has already been pointed out in this thread, was arrested
recently.

MyRedis was starting to grow at a rate that I no longer felt comfortable
saying I could manage. I was starting to fall behind in basic admin stuff, and
it wasn't fair to my customers. This was the entire reason I finally decided
to find someone who could take care of the MyRedis customers, and hence, where
we are today.

I've spent nearly $50,000.00 of my own savings to build MyRedis, and support
my family while doing so. I've learned a ton, and I'm going to pick myself up
and do it again, someday.

I hope this transparency sheds some light on MyRedis. It wasn't some big
company, it was me. I woke up every day and personally answered tickets, wrote
code, and lived and breathed MyRedis. In the end, though. It's the customers
who matter.

~~~
opendomain
Miles, If you want to apply what you learned hosting other NoSQL databases in
the cloud, please contact me HN AT nosql dot com.

~~~
miles-myredis
Sent you an email.

------
mbell
It appears that the owner has responded several times in this thread but is
hellbanned.

For those that don't have show dead on:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=wedtm](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=wedtm)

EDIT: Apparently you still need to enable show dead to see his recent comments
even when using the above link.

~~~
eksith
The thread that initiated the hellban seems to have been plucked right out of
Reddit. A case study of how not to behave on HN.

------
727374
This is a great illustration of why I'd never use a startup to host my
database.

------
aaronpk
Filing this under: "how not to announce an acquisition"

~~~
hvs
Also filing Garantia Data under "companies I will never work with."

------
gamache
I was evaluating Redis Cloud at work, but this gives me real pause. This
reflects very poorly on Garantia Data.

Any suggestions for other hosted Redis services people like?

~~~
acjohnson55
If you want no frills, low cost, you can fire up a Dotcloud Redis instance
pretty easily.

~~~
nasalgoat
If you really want low cost and no frills, just run redis locally.

I still don't understand the point of third party redis - I'm not aware of a
service that is more lightweight and CPU friendly than redis.

------
zheng
Their update that data _might_ be kept around until the 30th, but they won't
have support after Friday is almost an insult to injury here. I don't
understand why they wouldn't just continue to support MyRedis for some
reasonable amount of time. So not worth it.

------
zerop
Never understood why would someone like to use hosted Redis solutions from
redis-cloud, redistogo etc... Their Customers are developers.. why cant
developers spawn an instance with Redis on it and use it themselves.. how does
this hosted redis business model work..?

~~~
gamache
I have modest needs from Redis -- basically I want a queue ~1000 items long,
under 1MB per item.

I could provision a couple of EC2 servers, get Redis going on them, set up
some sort of monitoring, some failover mechanism, etc. $X/month.

Or I could pay someone $Y/month to give me a Redis server I can use, and not
have to care about the rest, so I can spend time worrying about things more
relevant to my actual goals.

If $Y is not much more than $X, it's a very easy decision.

~~~
nasalgoat
If you have modest needs of it, just run it on the same machine.

The whole point of redis is _low latency_ data queries, which running on some
third-party service you lose.

~~~
gamache
That might be _a_ point of Redis, but it's certainly not the whole point, as I
don't care about it but Redis is still useful to me.

And again, just because I can do it myself doesn't mean I should. I came into
adulthood as a sysadmin. I can take a project from bolting racks into the
floor to writing front-end code, but I don't. There are better ways.

------
Terretta
Not much notice considering how likely it is for people to be on holiday this
week (taking advantage of the long weekend).

------
nickv
Classy move - especially w.r.t it being a long weekend in the US.

~~~
CanSpice
The long weekend in the US was last weekend, before this announcement. I don't
see what that has to do with anything.

~~~
nickv
Every company i've ever worked is usually "extra busy" after a long weekend
because they're catching up with email/calls/etc that have gathered during it
(and also support issues, etc.)

Coming into work right after a few days off and having this thrown on your
plate with no notice just adds to this. (But ultimately, it's really about the
complete lack of notice more than anything else.)

------
vibrant
This story repeats with most such startups: \- indextank - was a great cloud
full text indexing service, acquired by linkedin \- mailgun - acquired by
rackspace - still functioning but they stopped expanding into interesting
directions and are winding down some of their more advanced APIs

So bottom line is, if you want to be sure about your data, set it up on your
servers instead of some hot cloud providing startup..

~~~
loginalready
You can reduce this argument all the way to writing your own OS and building
your own hardware. And no, that is not ad absurdum, there are valid real world
business cases for both.

It all depends an a simple cost/benefit calculation. There's no absolute right
or wrong choice.

Also, not having the knowledge to do something is a way bigger vulnerability
than outsourcing the execution.

My preferred approach is to figure out how to do it ourselves, immediately
followed by finding a 3rd party to outsource it to once we know exactly what
we need so we can focus on other things. And of course always make sure we are
able to take it back.

------
thepumpkin1979
Well, I can see it coming... A tumblr to call all startups that are acqui-
hired and betraying their customers with such short notices.

~~~
scraplab
[http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/](http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/)

------
garantiadata
We totally agree and our customers ALWAYS come first.

Regrettably this entire discussion, while valid in other contexts, is the
result of human error. myredis.com will continue to be fully operational until
the end of the month. At that date it will discontinue its operations due to
reasons that are beyond our control.

We invite every myredis.com user to give our Redis Cloud service a try and
decide for herself/himself whether we live up to their expectations.
Furthermore, all paying myredis.com who will choose a comparable subscription
from our service for their business, will be given a 30-day full money-back
guarantee so they'll be truly free to make their own choices without risk.

------
nazka
Can they really do this? They haven't obligations for their customers? It is
strange on a justice point of view. It is not because they acquired it than
they have all rights such as break any current contracts.

------
angersock
I'm not sure that I see the big deal here--the message seems to be "Hey, we're
going to be turning off these features, and migrating user data over here as
needed. Here's where to file support tickets, here's the timetable for service
deprecation, and here's what may or may not be under our old SLA."

Though it is somewhat annoying, it's hardly a slap in the face for people.

~~~
gamache
When that timetable is 72 hours long, it's a slap in the face.

We'd be talking about this a lot differently if MyRedis' sunset were six
months out.

------
jacquesm
Every time something like this happens the rest of us have it _just_ that much
harder.

------
loginalready
Note to self: never use Redis Cloud or any service offered by Garantia (oh,
the irony of that name...).

This is not hypothetical, I'm seriously considering using a Redis cloud
service instead of running our own.

~~~
garantiadata
We entirely sympathize with your sentiments given the inflammatory nature of
this discussion. We hope that the clarifications provided helped you to change
back your mind. If, however, you are still doubtful of our standing commitment
to our customers and the entire Redis community, please contact us at
info@garantiadata.com so we can have a real dialog regarding your concerns.

