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Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

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Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#151

Post by nthj »

troels wrote: post #128
gaoshan wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 if it's equivalent to a Civic in almost every way.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#152

Post by wisty »

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 ACCC is like the FCC, but they are backed by a very hardcore piece of legislation, which bans misleading or deceptive conduct - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misleading_or_deceptive_conduct

Not just lying, but anything the court consideres "misleading or deceptive".

It's a consumer right's lawyer's wet dream - they can argue that basically any company which screws consumers is being misleading or deceptive; and it's going to be up to the company to convince the court otherwise.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#154

Post by thirdstation »

They did the same for their perpetually paying customers too. When I signed up for my TextDrive account it was billed as one price ($10/month) forever. Then Joyent bought them and things were OK for a while but I figured that was the end of my price guarantee.

My biggest issue with Joyent is they seem to change their services every year or two while letting their legacy customers languish. I used to have an account on a shared host. Now I have a Smart Machine, or maybe a Shared Accelerator. I'm not sure anymore and they keep changing the support website.

Now I just use them for mail but, I'm dissatisfied with that so I'm looking to move.

What I want is to pay for a service and not worry about it. It's too much work being their customer nowadays.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#156

Post by rmc »

wisty wrote: post #152
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 ACCC is like the FCC, but they are backed by a very hardcore piece of legislation, which bans misleading or deceptive conduct - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misleading_or_deceptive_conduct Not just lying, but anything the court consideres "misleading or deceptive". It's a consumer right's lawyer's wet dream - they can argue that basically any company which screws consumers is being misleading or deceptive; and it…

they can argue that basically any company which screws consumers is being misleading or deceptive

Er... good? Misleading and deceptive companies get prosecuted. Good.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#157

Post by gaoshan »

Joyent just offered me 50% of my original investment back as a payout. Anyone else hearing this? Might be more lucrative than whatever a class-action lawsuit would return to each of us.

Might take them up on it as it's better than the hosting deal they are offering (given that i want nothing to do with them, anyway... dollar for dollar it seems about equal).

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#158

Post by berodam »

pmb wrote: post #20
pmb wrote: post #17

I paid the extra $$ for lifetime (and did it back when I was a grad student and had basically zero money) because I didn't want to have to think about hosting any more. Now I have to think about hosting again. Ugh. Broken promises leave a bad taste in my mouth.

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).

I'm really happy with asmallorange the service is cheap and customer support is great

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#159

Post by larrys »

mikeash wrote: post #145
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…

Why wouldn't somebody sue? It sounds like this service cost a minimum of hundreds of dollars, which is enough to be significant, but still small enough to fit within small claims. If I were one of these customers I'd certainly consider it.

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

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#160

Post by petermonsson »

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #57
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).

I highly recommend Webfaction: http://www.webfaction.com?affiliate=hammertime Yes, I just shamelessly put in an affiliate link, but the service really is very good. It's shared hosting but you get SSH, a smart admin panel and very reasonable prices for your memory. After a few years using it, I'm also happy to report that their technical support is excellent - timely, helpful and knowledgeable.

Thanks for pointing out WebFaction. Of all the mentioned solutions WebFaction seems to me to be the closest thing to the old TextDrive shared hosting. I'm getting too old to want to get my hands dirty with managing my own VPS for a few simple PHP sites, some email accounts and my subversion repositories (and I can even switch to git).
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