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Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

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Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#171

Post by kenmck »

drewmclellan wrote: post #164
cletus wrote: post #109

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…

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…

Exactly. I can and will be moving elsewhere. My three puny sites can hardly be making their servers tick over the most active only gets ~2000 uniques on a good month.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#172

Post by mikeash »

phearlez wrote: post #131
blndcat wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks Jeff for clearing this up

I suspect this cuts right to the core of "why" Joyent would dump pretty low-overhead services and catch the flack over it. The hardware requirements to provide this shared hosting environment has plunged over the years; it's part of why I disagree with the "why did you EXPECT a lifetime deal" folks - because I always assumed that such a level of service would get cheaper and easier. Except the one thing that doesn't…

The idea that the hosting would get cheaper over time is interesting. If you assume that the ongoing costs follow a Moore's Law type exponential curve (which may not be true, but seems like a decent rough approximation) then the total cost to provide a constant service for an infinite time is finite!

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#173

Post by kenmck »

patio11 wrote: post #11

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 $15…

Thanks for the clarification Patrick. I was too busy fuming to explain.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#174

Post by mikeash »

timkeller wrote: post #69

> "...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.

It's always amusing when companies (or people) contradict themselves to rationalize their decisions. The ongoing costs of this service are too large for us to sustain! By the way, only a few obscure people are using it so it will impact virtually nobody!

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#175

Post by agravier »

drewmclellan wrote: post #164
cletus wrote: post #109

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…

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…

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

You are giving the average customer way too much behavioral credit. Companies abuse confidence because they can get away with it, of course.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#177

Post by 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.

----

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#178

Post by dredmorbius »

xiaoma wrote: post #106
patio11 wrote: post #11

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 $15…

It was $500. Here's an archive of their site: http://web.archive.org/web/20060203030930/http://www.textdri... >One-time payment of $499 >We're pleased to announce a special offer that combines three great products in our family — TextDrive, Strongspace and Joyent — available for a one-time payment of just $499. > What do you get? >TextDrive's spectacularly feature-rich web, mail and data hosting; oceans of backup roo…

From the TOU (also at archive.org, linked from the above document): dispute is to be resolved by arbitration. More suckage.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#179

Post by jackolas »

opendomain wrote: post #42

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.

best of luck, if I was in the situation I'd definitely sue in small claims court.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#180

Post by michaelhoffman »

mikeash wrote: post #168
larrys wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree and essentially realized that when responding to _delirium above with regards to small claims court which I hadn't considered on first glance.

Cool! With all the attention that big lawsuits get, it's easy to forget that small claims is there, and sometimes even effective.

If more than a few people file in small claims, it is going to be a super big hassle for Joyent.
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