Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

plus.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 274 posts

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#101

Post by cromulent »

holgate wrote: post #37
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…

There were actually a number of "VC" phases with TextDrive, starting with the "VC200" in 2004 that raised $40,000 from 200 pledges of $200 to acquire and set up the hardware-- http://photodude.com/2004/06/01/textdrive-or-how-to-raise-40... That was followed by a number of upgrade offerings ("Mixed Grill", "3 Martini Lunch") in subsequent years, extending into the Joyent merger/acquisition, that required a larger lump…

I switched across to the Mixed Grill in May 2006 (right around when John Gruber quit Joyent to do Daring Fireball full-time, I remember). It cost $499USD.

Did I expect more than 6 years? Yeah, I took them at their word - "as long as we exist".

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#102

Post by larrys »

_delirium wrote: post #66
larrys wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I wonder why Joyent thinks they can get away with this" "As long as we exist" Possession is 9/10ths of the law. Nobody is going to file a private lawsuit to enforce this (assuming there is even a leg to stand on to enforce it I haven't read the exact contractual promise..) And the other option would be a class action lawsuit where there would have to be enough class members to interest an attorney. (Not relevant in…

Although it still wouldn't be a cost-effective use of time, a sufficiently peeved customer could file a small-claims suit for a return of the fee (or some portion of it).

Actually not a bad strategy assuming the venue is convenient.

A corporation has to be defended by an attorney while an individual can be pro se.

As a result the corporation would typically want to settle rather than spend money to go to defend in court. My guess is as long as the person filing the suit didn't blog about it and bring attention to the action beforehand there would be incentive to settle this out of small claims court. The amount settled for could easily be the value over time of the "lifetime" benefit. If the company choose to go to small claims court and lost it would certainly not be to their benefit as it would show others what was possible and set some precedent.

Keep in mind that even if the company feels their contract is airtight they might decide to settle simply to not have to pay legal fees in many cases.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#103

Post by gadders »

smackfu wrote: post #80
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #18

This actually seems fairly typical for most free or lifetime plans for things. Are there counterexamples of site/services that offered lifetime access that are still doing so 5 years later?

Tivo has Lifetime subscriptions, where the lifetime is of the hardware but they transfer if you sell the hardware. They aren't always selling them as an option, but they always honor them, and have been for 10+ years.

I had one of the original Tivos in the UK, and I bought a lifetime subscription.

They ended this service in 2011.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiVo#United_Kingdom

They no longer honour this deal in UK (which sucks, because I loved it).

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#104

Post by SwellJoe »

smackfu wrote: post #75
mikeash wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the comments seem to be filled with people saying that it's not practical to provide "lifetime", and people buying it should have known they didn't mean it anyway. I look at this the same way I look at "unlimited" internet service. Unlike a lot of the tech crowd, I have no problem whatsoever with metered bandwidth. My only quibble is that if you advertise "unlimited" you had better actually provide unlimited. I…

Personally, I think it's much more likely any random internet companie's life is a lot shorter than my own.

Yet, Joyent still exists.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#105

Post by howradical »

calinet6 wrote: post #92
howradical wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am Matt from Slicehost. And yes, if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

Matt, I was a very early slicehost customer, and just wanted to say thanks for the years of great service and straightforward business. I really loved what you did and hope you're continuing to do well. Cheers!

My pleasure, thank you for believing in us.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#106

Post by xiaoma »

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 room at Strongspace; early access to the future of web-based organization, communication and productivity through the Joyent suite of interconnected applications. Perfect for a smart small business or smart individuals of any size.

>How long is it good for?

>As long as we exist.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#107

Post by slig »

wmf wrote: post #96
patrickgzill wrote: post #78

Seems a little odd, surely with the cheaper RAM, far more powerful CPUs and inexpensive disks these days, they could spend a few $$$ and burn a couple of U , keeping their customers happy? I don't know how many servers they would have needed in 2007 to provide the services they sold, but surely now they could consolidate all those users onto 1/4 the machines? What is this negative press costing them?

I think the real issue is that Joyent no longer provides any form of shared hosting and they don't want to. So they have no equivalent service to migrate the old lifetime customers to. They'd probably lose quite a bit of money if they migrate lifetime customers to their cloud.

I bet they're going to lose more in bad PR. People here usually do not forget fuck ups.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#108

Post by dholowiski »

pmb wrote: post #55
evanwalsh wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're comfortable getting dirty, I'd check out http://prgmr.com/xen/

Thanks! This looks ideal for my needs!

I have two small servers from them. Highly recommended (if you don't mind getting your hands dirty).

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#109

Post by cletus »

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 this with AT&T's "unlimited" wireless data plans recently [2].

I know why people do it: as an alternative to raising capital. Businesses do Groupons for the same reason. In fact, I'm feeling like a broken record here [3].

The problem with Groupon (and similar "offer" sites) is they create the wrong incentives and attract the worst kind of customer. The best situation for Groupon and for businesses is for lots of people to buy the offers and then not to use them.

The lesson here is that if you want to create a sustainable and liked business, you need to align your incentives with those of your customers [4].

As a customer, stop falling for this charade.

As a business, stop taking short term cash flows for perpetual liabilities just to raise capital.

Seriously.

EDIT: regarding "unlimited" (in Karunamon's comment), he is correct: we do need to hold companies to a higher standard. For example, Australia's ACCC (I guess equivalent to the FTC but with a heavy focus on consumer rights) has cracked down on the use of "unlimited" (eg [5]).

But that just reinforces my point. In Australia pretty much all Internet plans have stated quotas. With unlimited plans you create the wrong incentives to throttle users, impose nebulous "fair use" conditions and generally whittle away at what's really "unlimited".

It's the wrong incentive system.

With Internet quotas at least you know you're getting what you pay for and your plan is priced for your usage, not some median or 95% usage that will constantly have the provider trying to throttle "power users".

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3936701

[2]: http://mashable.com/2012/03/01/att-limits-unlimited-data/

[3]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2649739

[4]: http://www.accountingweb.com/blogs/ronaldbaker/firms-future/...

[5]: http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2010/12/accc-taking-tpg-to-cour...

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#110

Post by gaoshan »

slig wrote: post #14

Great, one company less to worry about next time I'm shopping for hosting.

Seriously. We are looking at hosting right now and are considering Rackspace and Joyent. In fact, I am one of the lifetime hosting people screwed over by this move, but this makes it an easy call. No way we are trusting Joyent with anything.
Post reply on HN