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Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

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Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#191

Post by Terretta »

Karunamon wrote: post #125
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…

Reposting a dead reply from otneusnocuh because it took the exact words out of my mouth: > "As a customer, stop falling for this charade." No, theres is no reason not to take them at their word. "lifetime" and "unlimited" need to be protected advertising words. There is no reason whatsoever to tolerate straight up lies in marketing because they are common lies.

The word was not just used as "lifetime of the product".

    TextDrive, Strongspace and Joyent
    One-time payment of $499

    We're pleased to announce a special offer that combines 
    three great products in our family — TextDrive, 
    Strongspace

    How long is it good for?
    As long as we exist.
See http://web.archive.org/web/20060203030930/http://www.textdri...

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#192

Post by tomson »

gaoshan wrote: post #157

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).

Retrace your footsteps back to your original upgrade and cross-grade package. http://textusers.com/wiki/Lifetime_plans

One disgruntled VC200

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#193

Post by raganwald »

brey wrote: post #150
raganwald wrote: post #132

The fairest way to offer "lifetime" or "unlimited" plans is to include a simple warranty: "If we ever cancel this plan, we will refund your money in full."

yup. I'd be suspicious of any "unlimited" plan which didn't offer such a guarantee - anything that doesn't put its money where its mouth is is just marketing, a polite euphemism for "lies" in this case. or time-bound it, so everyone's clear - if I know I'm buying a 10 year plan, that's fine. I know I'm getting value for money, and the service provider knows they have a finite projected cost.

The other way to look at it is that the service provider is borrowing money from you and paying you in services instead of interest. They have the right to pay the principal of the loan back at any time.

If their cost to provide the service is below the market cost of loaning them money, the difference is their margin. They simply need to price the "lifetime service" appropriately such that there's a market demand for it. If the price the market will pay is too little relative to their cost to provide the service, then they don't have a viable "lifetime offering."

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#194

Post by irickt »

Terretta wrote: post #191
Karunamon wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reposting a dead reply from otneusnocuh because it took the exact words out of my mouth: > "As a customer, stop falling for this charade." No, theres is no reason not to take them at their word. "lifetime" and "unlimited" need to be protected advertising words. There is no reason whatsoever to tolerate straight up lies in marketing because they are common lies.

The word was not just used as "lifetime of the product". TextDrive, Strongspace and Joyent One-time payment of $499 We're pleased to announce a special offer that combines three great products in our family — TextDrive, Strongspace How long is it good for? As long as we exist. See http://web.archive.org/web/20060203030930/http://www.textdri...

Jason Hoffman is not embarassed to rewrite history to his advantage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yluchvyUzvU

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#195

Post by wmf »

Isofarro wrote: post #185
drewmclellan wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Everything you say makes sense, and yet... the reason it was called the "VC" plan is that the customers could expect to get many times more service than they paid for if Joyent was successful. And Joyent has been successful, although by pivoting into a different market. (I realize it wasn't an actual investment; no need to pedantically point that out.) (Edit: I see _delirium already made this argument.)

Would you call the Facebook mural artist a "bottom-feeder" for actually trying to cash in his stock because it's worth "too much"? http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/07/facebook-graffiti-a...

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#196

Post by Isofarro »

minsight wrote: post #112
thirdhaf wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as it's not terribly mission critical I'd suggest a VPS. Since you have a virtualized server you get everything you mentioned (and the responsibility of keeping the damn thin up to date). Take a look at http://lowendbox.com You're likely to find deals in the $20/yr range for small instances with ~128MB RAM. Expect 99% uptime and you'll be pleasantly surprised with the third nine.

The deals on lowendbox are a bit too low end. The providers often disappear after a few months.

If you chose a supplier at random, they yes, some of those will probably disappear after a few months. But if you spend some time digging around a little, you'll find things like "Best Provider of the Year" type posts (e.g. http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/best-low-end-providers-in-2011... ). These tend not to be fly by nighters.

Consider starting with that list, and look for recent offers by them. Also read the comments on each offer looking for irregularities. Lowendbox has a decent community, they know when an offer smells, or when a fly-by-nighter drops in. Granted it won't be perfect, but you can reduce the risk of a provider disappearing all of a sudden with a little bit of reading and digging.

Two in particular I find trustworthy: VooServers and Evorack

But beware, many low-end-box type providers use stock standard off-the-shelf tools and software, including WHM. So if you have a religious disagreement with passwords in cleartext emails, you should steer well clear of lowendbox/WHM combinations and go for a highend supplier instead.

Or perhaps a more practical method, don't use a secure password when you sign up, and make it more secure on the VM itself when you log in for the first time

YMMV.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#197

Post by holgate »

Isofarro wrote: post #185
drewmclellan wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

You're operating on incomplete information. The subsequent lifetime plans offered between 2004-2007 cost considerably more than $200, and most of the original VC200 paid more later on, following the Joyent-Textdrive merger/acquisition, to upgrade to larger lifetime packages and additional services. Scroll down and you'll find users whose per-month equivalent is comparable to a bottom-end Linode VPS.

Judging from Twitter and forum discussions today, most of the remaining lifetime customers use other hosts for many projects, but retain their Joyent packages for sites with relatively minimal requirements: non-profits, simple personal sites, etc. What they paid for wasn't server specs or even the quality of service: it was the explicit promise, in return for paying a chunk of change up-front, of not having to think about hosting options or plan a migration while Joyent remained in business. You can't simply apply a per-month calculation for that.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#198

Post by genbattle »

mikeash wrote: post #143
Karunamon wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reposting a dead reply from otneusnocuh because it took the exact words out of my mouth: > "As a customer, stop falling for this charade." No, theres is no reason not to take them at their word. "lifetime" and "unlimited" need to be protected advertising words. There is no reason whatsoever to tolerate straight up lies in marketing because they are common lies.

Lifetime service can be really useful for a company to sell, too. It's basically a way for them to borrow money at a cost potentially below what other capital markets may provide. If you have customers who will buy and are wiling to take the risk that you'll go out of business, it can be a good way to raise money without becoming indebted to banks or VC. I imagine Joyent benefitted from this when they were starting o…

Just thinking of a specific case, but what do you think about subscription games that promise a lifetime membership (e.g. Star Trek online), then end up going F2P anyway?

I would postulate that this is a similar issue, as you are now being charged for the game _again_ via the F2P model. That said, it seems like it would be a harder one to solve; would the paid content have to be available to the lifetime subscribers for free? Would you stop the game from going F2P to uphold the lifetime/unlimited advertising limitations?

In the latter case I'm sure companies would just stop offering unlimited plans for games like this. I think it also sends the wrong message: if you're offering "unlimited" plans at launch, you obviously don't have that much faith in the longevity of your subscription game.

I agree that companies need to stop offering unlimited use of a product or service where their costs keep scaling with use. Companies always need to base this sort of pricing on the maximum possible natural lifetime of the product, not on when they can pull it if they get into hot water. We had the same thing here in New Zealand when the incumbent ISP offered "unlimited" ADSL plans. Their network of course got clobberred, and they backtracked on it and paid out all customers who'd been on the plan after a complaint to the government about false advertising (they started surreptitiously shaping traffic after some months). They later bought the plans back, but with much more fine print, and much more traffic shaping and regulation on the connections.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#199

Post by wmf »

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.

The service may have high fixed costs. If they have one person maintaining something that's used by very few customers the cost per customer would be very high.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#200

Post by TillE »

mikeash wrote: post #172
phearlez wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Computation will always require some energy though, so the cost will approach some nonzero constant. Still infinite.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle

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