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Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

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Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#231

Post by ceejayoz »

Xcelerate wrote: post #228
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…

Wow! Seriously? Look at what you wrote: >> 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. >> 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." If you ever start a company, let me know so I can be su…

I didn't see any customer blaming, nor condoning of this behaviour. Just an accurate analysis of why when you see "lifetime" or "unlimited" advertised, it's generally best to run the other way.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#232

Post by graue »

dasil003 wrote: post #217
Isofarro wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 R…

Great summary. Yeah, TextDrive was presented as an alternative to Dreamhost that, although seemingly much more pricey, was not oversold (you can use all the space/bandwidth they give you), had better support, ran more smoothly, etc etc. By and for people who love the web, or something like that.

But there were tons of reliability problems from the start. It didn't help that Jason Hoffman handled criticism very poorly. I vaguely remember one incident where someone complained on the TextDrive forum and, taking it as a personal insult, he deleted the person's (hosting, not forum) account on the spot. There seemed to be always an excuse or a promise that some exciting better thing was around the corner to solve all the problems.

ZFS was one such exciting thing as you mention. There was also supposed to be a new administration interface called TextPanel, and it was constantly being talked up on the forums, how great it was going to be. Complete vaporware. In 2012, the crusty super-slow Webmin interface that was claimed to be temporary is still all that's available.

The shared hosting eventually became reasonably stable and reliable, but I suspect that's only because it wasn't being touched at all, and anyone doing anything nontrivial there had probably moved it to another host. Last fall I tried to set up a WordPress blog. Couldn't, because the PHP version was too old, and when I checked, it turned out (in 2011) the version of PHP being used dated to 2006.

My server just had a multi-day outage starting August 13th due to hardware failure, and is not fully restored even now (a bunch of emails are missing). I suspect this is what precipitated Hoffman's announcement. Apparently lifetime hosting was supposed to mean zero maintenance on Joyent's part.

Honestly, they should've done what Google Fiber recently did for its free internet deal: just say it's "guaranteed for at least 7 years". Many would still have signed up and they'd be within their rights to shut down most of those accounts by now. But what happened instead was a lot of us paid for "lifetime" hosting that lasted only 7 years or less, which was actively maintained for only 1 or 2 years, and during that time never lived up to the quality advertised.

But who knows, maybe Joyent and Hoffman have learned some lessons since 2005. I do expect they'll be good enough to give me a full refund, obviating the need to join any lawsuits.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#233

Post by ceejayoz »

MikeKusold wrote: post #111
mileswu wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon EC2 on the micro plan maybe? It's free for the first year as a trial.

Does that plan require the cluster to spin up if you haven't had a visitor in a while? That's the reason I don't use Heroku for my personal site.

Nope, EC2 is essentially a VPS host, unlike Heroku.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#234

Post by gtirloni »

mileswu wrote: post #48
pmb wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Amazon EC2 on the micro plan maybe? It's free for the first year as a trial.

I bought a 3-year micro instance for my personal needs and it's been pretty good.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#235

Post by georgemcbay »

ajross wrote: post #54
zdw wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The prices were considerably higher than you mention - $500 or $1000 - here's a post about moving between "lifetime" plans from 2007: http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?id=13148

Which (if you signed up at the end of 2006 and just got cancelled) comes out to about $7.50 a month. That's more than a EC2 micro instance on a 3 year reserved plan.

Dividing a user's costs by the number of months of service they got isn't fair because it ignores the high risk they took on that the company would go out of business months after they dropped their $500 or $1000 or whatever.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#236

Post by admax88q »

DASD wrote: post #90
pmb wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

You might be interested in prgmr.com . VPS based on Xen. The owner is also a member of HN and wrote "The Book of Xen" a couple of years ago. Also since you mentioned UNIX, maybe arpnetworks.com . As I recall they run Linux KVM VPS but offer OpenBSD and FreeBSD if preferred over a Linux guest.

I don't think OpenBSD runs on Xen as a guest yet. They do offer NetBSD, not sure about FreeBSD

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#238

Post by troels »

nthj wrote: post #151
troels wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#239

Post by weel »

smsm42 wrote: post #162
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…

The customers should be careful, however this does not absolve people who claim "our lifetime account will be good as long as we exist" ( http://web.archive.org/web/20060203030930/http://www.textdri... ) from responsibility to uphold their end of the bargain. They got the $500, they have to deliver. If they can't, it's a breach of contract. Of course, as a customer, you should be aware that your supplier could breach…

I am not a lawyer and the following is my oversimplified understanding of the law as an economist who has taken some law&econ classes. But...

Just because you have a cause of action for breach of contract (the law recognizes the other guy should've kept his promise) does not mean you can get the remedy of specific performance (where the other guy is actually ordered to make good after all). The standard common law remedy is _in specie_ damages (the other guy has to pay up). The exact rules about when the court can compel specific performance are messy (written by lawyers), but it seems to me that basically what they all come down to is that no judge is going to say "I compel performance" if there's no feasible, relatively hassle-free way to actually, physically, compel performance. And that, in practice, tends to mean cases where the promise was title (legal ownership) to property: the judge can make the promise be kept by simply awarding the title to you. Actually getting the other guy to give you the cow or get off the land that's newly yours is a matter of property law, which has procedures such as replevy (where the Sheriff waves a gun around while you take the cow) and ejection (where the Sheriff waves a gun around telling them to get off your land.) These things can get messy enough as it is, and no judge wants to be responsible for having a sheriff waving a gun around to, say, compel somebody to give you a haircut. (And a GOOD haircut too, or else I'll shoot!) In such cases, the tricky specific performance business is transformed by the law into a straightforward money debt of the sort that can be enforced using, you guessed it, Sheriffs with guns, as well as garnishment of wages and the like. (I'm pretty sure that in the US, though, debts arising from judgments in breach of contracts cases are dischargeable in bankruptcy. Don't trust me on this, but I think it's pretty much only tax debts, student loans, and judgments for "intentional" torts that aren't dischargeable.)

All right, so after that long paragraph full of chattels and replevies and Sheriffs, if you are still reading, let's just assume that what could be had in court was monetary damages.

How much?

Oh, I would say about $500. Maybe a small multiple of that, but how are you going to convince a judge that you paid $500 for something that is worth much more than a small multiple of $500 to you?

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#240

Post by weel »

pmb wrote: post #201
colinshark wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty easy for a promise + money exchanged to become a contract.

We had all of: offer, acceptance, consideration, meeting of the minds, capacity, and legality. It sure felt like a contract to me.

Yup. Now as for damages, though, even though indeed they are supposed to cover your lost value and not the original price, the original price is going to set a point of reference that will influence how much you could reasonably convince any judge your lost value is. But say we compute it another way. Suppose you can buy equivalent service from Amazon for $100 a year forever. The net present value of that perpetuity at a 10% interest rate is $1000. You can easily see why if you imagine investing the $1000 at the 10% interest rate and using the interest each year to buy hosting: your principal would stay at $1000 forever. Now plug in numbers you actually think are feasible. And subtract attorney's fees. Good luck.
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