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Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

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Re: Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

#91

Post by Klinky »

jaaron wrote: post #90
Klinky wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The better option would be for Jason Hoffman to say that he stands by his offer & will ensure that those who took advantage of the TextDrive deal will continue to see the same level of service or better that they received back when they bought it. Advertise your new services fine, but don't try to upsell people anytime there is downtime & don't go around telling everyone that these people are whiners getting their se…

Okay, I get that migrating costs time and that's definitely not free, but saying that Jason upselling is false. It's been repeated by a number of commenters here and it's starting to bother me. I'm a lifetime Joyent (TextDrive) member. When Joyent started offering newer shared hosting accounts, they allowed me and all other lifetime members the opportunity to migrate. No new fees, no hassle. Just a nice, shiny new sp…

So there are no monthly fees after migrating from the old TextDrive servers?

It sounds like the offers to migrate have either not been sent to all or the messaging has been inconsistent as to costs/ease with which this can be performed.

Re: Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

#92

Post by fingerprinter »

tylerritchie wrote: post #80
fingerprinter wrote: post #78

FOR JASONHOFFMAN I see you posting quite a bit here...you keep saying the same thing: "take the free upgrade that is being offered". There also seems to be quite a few old textdrive lifetime members here. Perhaps the best approach would be for you to outline the steps for those textdrive folks to migrate off of those servers and take the free upgrade you are offering. I personally have no idea how...so if you could e…

From one of the very many forum posts on the exact topic: "If you have not sent in a request and would like to get a jump on the migration, please send an email to support [at] joyent [dot] com with the following information: - Subject line: migration request + plan type if known (startup, plus, premier) - Full Name - User Name(s) / Primary Domain(s) (please note new info if you want to change it at this time) - Exis…

Thank you for that.

I find it a tad bit odd that I received NO emails on migration. Frankly, there is no conceivable way that announcing in a Joyent forum and expecting users to become aware of it is a sound strategy. Pull vs Push and all that.

Even so, I'm willing to migrate if I can find some additional information as to what is involved.

Again, thanks for posting...I'll go digging through Joyent's forums now....

Re: Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

#93

Post by random42 »

jasonhoffman wrote: post #22
chuckmcknight wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, Joyent migrated my TextDrive lifetime account to their newer stuff at no charge. Did you ask Tech Support if there was a migration path for you?

This is correct. We've been offering upgrades to newer stuff. You just need to contact support.

Is the upgrade free/reimburses for the old package?

Re: Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

#94

Post by gaoshan »

jasonhoffman wrote: post #20
gaoshan wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was hoping to not see a comment like this. I, too, bought the lifetime account back when I was active with Textpattern CMS and joined in as part of a drive they had to raise funds (managed by Dean Allen, the originator of Textdrive and then at Joyent, who has seemingly disappeared into the ether since then). At the time I knew it was a bit of a risk but I had my fingers crossed that their word would be good. So far…

Hi. This is Jason Hoffman, Dean's co-founder of Textdrive and current founder at Joyent. If you're worried about your sites on the old Pendrell, then go over to support and take the upgrade that's been offered and migrate off.

Jason, I remember you from back in the day... enjoyed your flickr series of photos where you blogged about setting up the then new Textdrive data center. That even got me to install open solaris and use it as a headless server for a while (and did not add to the downvote pounding you are taking here, FWIW). I don't see anything on the Joyent site about this upgrade offer to migrate off. In fact, I don't see a support section period. Do you have a link?

Re: Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

#95

Post by boredzo »

jasonhoffman wrote: post #22
chuckmcknight wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, Joyent migrated my TextDrive lifetime account to their newer stuff at no charge. Did you ask Tech Support if there was a migration path for you?

This is correct. We've been offering upgrades to newer stuff. You just need to contact support.

Do we actually need to contact support to be upgraded? My understanding from the old Shared Accelerator documentation[1] (which you seem to have deleted) was that we were supposed to wait to be offered a “golden ticket”, unless we absolutely needed to be upgraded ASAP.

Are you even still offering regular (not “cloud”) web hosting? I can't find it on Joyent's site anymore; it seems as if the Shared Accelerator plans are discontinued, too.

[1]: http://wiki.joyent.com/shared:kb:start

Edit: Found it. This is the page that implies that TextDrive users have needed to wait for a “golden ticket” to be offered to them: http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20090305040858/http://wiki....

Re: Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

#96

Post by pygorex1 »

You get what you pay for.

This isn't a glib statement. A business transaction is about more than coming to agreement about the price of a thing or service. It's also about creating and maintaining incentives for both sides.

I pay slicehost for a VPS. They get $50/month from me in return for disk space, CPU cycles, uptime and support. Our incentives are aligned.

With Joyent/Textdrive, every month you get hosting and every month they get nothing. The incentives are not aligned. In fact, from Joyent's perspective, the incentive to provide any meaningful service diminishes over time. No about of cajoling or complaining or threatening Joyent will change this imbalance. Sure, it's 54 hours of downtime today - but I can guarantee that a year from now the outages will be far longer and far more frequent.

"But we had a deal!" Yes, you did. And you were a fool to enter into it.

Here's the bottom line:

Your customers don't care what's causing the downtime. It's still your fault.

Website users don't care that the deal has soured. It's still your responsibility.

Joyent doesn't care that they're providing cr@ppy service to Textdrive users, despite the postings on HN by Jason Hoffman (hey Jason, instead of wasting time posting on some internet forum, why not spend that time fixing the actual problem?)

Seriously - Joyent doesn't give a sh?t about the lifetime accounts. If they did, then why are you experiencing 54 hours of downtime? If they do care, and are applying resources to solve the problem, then why is it taking so long? 54 HOURS TO FIX A SERVER. That, to me, is evidence of a shocking level of incompetence. In either case I would get the hell out of there.

Re: Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

#97

Post by dasil003 »

Frankly, I'm surprised you are still on there. I too was an original VC and I left years ago due to the support failings.

Look, we were investors in the truest sense. TextDrive was this revolutionary new shared hosting platform with a lot of promise (flexibility, no overselling, etc). Problem was that shared hosting is a commodity with no profit margins. Since TextDrive was started by people who want to build cool shit, rather than people who knew anything about operations in a customer service industry, the result is a massive series of pivots that left us out in the cold.

I'm not making excuses for anyone here, personally I think Jason Hoffman spent way too much time in the forum sucking up the love, and not enough time figuring out how to run a support operation. So he burnt his bridge with me as a customer. I won't touch Joyent with a ten foot pole no matter how good it is.

But here's the thing: that was their bridge to burn.

It doesn't matter what 200 early customers think, because those 200 one-time payments were not going to build a successful company. The bottom line is that the market for a "premium" shared hosting service got squeezed by commodity hosting on one side, and VPSes on the other. Even if they had managed reasonable uptime (which they didn't because they totally underestimated the technical cost of giving people the freedom they did), it still would have been a doomed market, because VPSes got so cheap anyway. We can complain about what a bad deal we got, but it doesn't change the fact that the last salary we paid was in 2005, and the hosting world has moved on. They did what they had to.

Re: Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

#98

Post by dotBen »

jacques_chester wrote: post #86
jefe78 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for Linode. I've literally never had a problem. I'm a huge fan and I'm picky as hell.

I had a server go down twice due to outages at their Fremont data centre, but otherwise I've been very pleased.

I'm also a massive Linode fan, but here's my monthly HE-Fremont Data Center rant... don't run anything out of there (regardless of whether it is through Linode or a 3rd party).

The overal quality of their (Hurricane Electric, not Linode) operation is poor, historically they have been lax on shady people colo'ing rack space in Fremont (google hurricane electric mccolo), HE-1 is full and so little room for expansion and its on a fault line.

I've NEVER had any of these problems in Newark (which is Linode's geographically local DC as they are in NJ) or London.

Re: Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

#100

Post by ericd »

desigooner wrote: post #88

Is there any time that Mr. Hoffman's going to call it quits on this thread and actually take it offline in an attempt to resolve the OP's issues?! Frankly, the tone of most of his comments have been borderline denigrating and it's doing nothing but adding nuisance value to the thread.

He's probably getting exasperated by the virtual lynch mob which seems to be downvoting everything he says and upvoting every angry comment, which is ridiculous. He's actually saying quite a lot of reasonable and useful stuff which is sitting at 0 or below.
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