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Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

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Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#91

Post by _delirium »

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…

As far as getting one's money's worth, the "VC-like" pitching makes that odd. Obviously it wasn't an actual VC arrangement, but it had some similar aspects: you take a risk by giving $X now to buy a "lifetime account" with some startup that might be bankrupt next year. In return for helping to fund them and accepting that downside risk, your potential upside is that if they do succeed and exist long-term, you get what would in retrospect be below-market-priced service as a reward for your early support.

It doesn't make much sense to say that, hey, thanks for the "VC" investment when it was a risk to buy from us, but now that we're successful, you've gotten your money's worth.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#92

Post by calinet6 »

howradical wrote: post #29
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…

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!

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#93

Post by wensheng »

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 a small one from them as a NS server and has no issue at all. However their bandwidth allocation (40G for 256m plan) is not enough for pretty much anything else.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#94

Post by pmb »

mipapage wrote: post #82
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.

Funny, we got in on VCII I think and had to think about hosting all the time. Our server never performed well. I think we had one site on Textdrive that was live, and quite quickly moved to another host for obvious reasons. I'm glad it worked fro some people, overall a poor experience for us.

I never asked much of it - all I really cared was that it was hosting that I didn't have to think about. Two WordPress sites, some backups of important files and the occasional scp around a stupid firewall or NAT box. And now they are canceling the lifetime service, or, put their ham-handed way: "your lifetime service will end on October 31, 2012."

Seriously. Someone in charge of PR actually wrote down and sent out an email with the sentence "your lifetime service will end on October 31, 2012."

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#96

Post by wmf »

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.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#97

Post by stock_toaster »

blndcat wrote: post #51
stock_toaster wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't they cease to exist when they were acquired?

see footer of the page. They (TextDrive) were already acquired at the time of the offer.

Aha. That would indeed make a difference. ;) Thanks.

Re: Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

#100

Post by prodigal_erik »

This was the same service that had an outage last year which took over two days to recover from, for which their answer was basically "what did you expect, we're neglecting that server"? Sad thing is, putting the bottom line before responsibility is probably an effective strategy because the market does not penalize it sufficiently.
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