Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

https://plus.google.com/u/0/112783391065033208484/posts/16WyAvu37wE

by kenmck • 14 years ago

283 269 14 years ago

plus.google.com

joevandyk• 14 years ago

I believe I also have a "lifetime" account, I have not received this email. Though I did switch over to the solaris machines a few years ago.

kenmck3• 14 years ago

I switched to the Solaris hosting some time ago as well.

hboon2• 14 years ago

I received the email. Felt unpleasant. It wasn't much financially, just the feeling that it is wrong.

kxr• 14 years ago

Same here, still haven't got anything.

OliverM• 14 years ago

I thought I'd switched over to Solaris hosting, but still got the email??

zdw3• 14 years ago

I really like what Joyent is doing with illumos, dtrace, and other similar projects. That said...

They basically have let their "legacy" customers languish for a while, and after a pretty bad migration process a year or two ago, it was obvious that they really wanted to discard these old accounts - those boxes are running a version of opensolaris that's over 4 years old (snv_67).

Most of us paid quite a bit for our "lifetime" subscriptions, just to have it ripped up into a bunch of different parts that either get EOL'ed or sold off to another company (as was done with Strongspace).

hemancuso3• 14 years ago

We're still developing Strongspace, and the lifetime subscribers are still being provided for by Joyent.

zdw3• 14 years ago

I'm not faulting Expandrive by any means - you guys are great.

Any intention to EOL the "lifetime" plans on your end?

nriley• 14 years ago

My account's server runs snv_121, so more like 3 years old, but still ancient. There was an attempt to upgrade us in December/January which was partially completed and finally "put on hold indefinitely". http://wiki.joyent.com/display/shared/Shared+Hosting+Mainten...

gexla2• 14 years ago

Mixed Griller here. I don't remember what the language was, but perhaps in this case "lifetime" meant the lifetime of the product, shared hosting. Personally, I'm happy with the accelerator, I never did like shared hosting and quit using it a long time ago except for a couple of sites that are gathering dust.

ceejayoz5• 14 years ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20060203030930/http://www.textdri...

Q: How long is it good for? A: As long as we exist.

stock_toaster2• 14 years ago

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

tait• 14 years ago

Gexla, I'm on an accelerator. They are going away too.

quangv• 14 years ago

I think lifetime should mean lifetime.

They should of given you at least 15 years free I think.

masterzora• 14 years ago

It appears that lifetime means lifetime of the product rather than lifetime of the customer. Is anyone really that surprised?

endersshadow3• 14 years ago

This is pretty common with consumer products. If something has a "lifetime warranty," that "lifetime" is typically a defined period of time (e.g.-seven years), not until you die.

rhizome• 14 years ago

Yes, apparently so.

ceejayoz5• 14 years ago

The folks who read the offer are probably surprised.

http://web.archive.org/web/20060203030930/http://www.textdri...

Q: How long is it good for? A: As long as we exist.

jessriedel• 14 years ago

According to michaelhoffman, the FAQ said this: "Q: How long is it good for? A: As long as we exist."

Seems pretty clear cut to me.

(Not sure this is accurate, though. I did find it repeated in a forum discussing Joyent in 2006.)

patio11• 14 years ago

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 $150 and $300 if I recall correctly.

I actually used them as a hosting provider for a while, and followed the support forums. Supporting the Lifetime offering was a challenge pretty much from the getgo, because some folks were less than neighborly with their usage of system resources, partially out of ignorance, partially out of Rails playing very poorly with shared systems, and partially because you attract an interesting type of customer with this offering. The physical hardware had some faults and probably has not improved much over time.

Meanwhile, shared hosting for Rails is, well, not a very attractive option over the last couple of years, thanks to VPSes, Heroku, Amazon, etc etc. Joyent apparently wants to exit the business.

Of note: I remember somebody asking Slicehost to match the business model and Matt shot them down saying that it was too gimmicky for his taste and wouldn't be mutually beneficial. Slicehost eventually came up with a neat solution towards the same end: they were oversubscribed, so they sorted their waiting list by the amount of non-refundable deposit you were willing to make, giving them much-needed cash flow without committing them to service for forever.

zdw3• 14 years ago

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

ajross• 14 years ago

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.

mileswu2• 14 years ago

Looking at my email I saw my Textdrive Lifetime hosting account was made in Sept 2005. I'm pretty sure I wasn't in on the first round either and I was second round "VC".

They also offered a lifetime package known as "Mixed Grill" and "3 Martini Lunch" that bundled the hosting, Strongspace (a file storage solution based on SFTP/rsync -- now spun off to a different company) and some collaboration suite (from Joyent).

po2• 14 years ago

I was (am?) also a TextDrive VCII customer. I signed up in March of 2005 and had a little home on a server called nelson. If my memory is correct it was around $450 or so and I hemmed and hawed over the decision. I was just getting out of the debt I had built up after the post-college/dotcom recession and it was a lot of money for me. However, I knew that I was going to continue programming for my career and so I saw it as an investment in them as well as myself. In 2008 I was asked to move to a Joyent shared accelerator (drake) and everything continued along.

I saw it as a genius business move for them: they got upfront capital in exchange for a promise to offer a commodity that their customers would naturally outgrow. Those customers would likely be highly influential and/or become power-users. Furthermore they would be able to grow bigger than they would otherwise without having to take VC money (which at the time was harder to come by and the VC had a lot more power/control). Now we have things like Kickstarter so the idea doesn't seem so strange anymore.

howradical4• 14 years ago

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

Yver• 14 years ago

Unless we're talking about American Airlines' Lifetime Pass.

calinet6• 14 years ago

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!

philgyford• 14 years ago

I paid $1399 for my TextDrive/Joyent "Three Martini Lunch" hosting, about six years ago. Which works out around $20/month. In retrospect, paying that amount up front doesn't seem "too good to be true", unfortunately.

holgate6• 14 years ago

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-sum payment.

Their pitch on lifetime service? "How long is it good for? As long as we exist."

http://web.archive.org/web/20060202181857/http://textdrive.c...

Now, you can argue in strictly financial terms that those initial customers (of whom I'm one) have probably got their money's worth, and that the hosting landscape has changed sufficiently that the lifetime products are peripheral to Joyent's main business. The counterargument is that Joyent not only acquired TextDrive's customers, but the goodwill surrounding Dean Allen's original venture, and has traded on that goodwill ever since. Clearly, they feel that's not worth much these days.

Furthermore, giving people who've had eight years of not having to think about hosting options just 80 days to migrate, with explicit notice that their servers will be shut down and wiped on October 31, strikes me as pretty cheap.

_delirium2• 14 years ago

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.

cromulent• 14 years ago

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".

accountoftheday• 14 years ago

Their behavior here is embarrassing and labels them as not trustworthy in the future. Pacta sunt servanda. The other side ending up potentially getting the better end of the deal, a nowhere near certain thing here from a 2004-6 perspective where their customers took significant risk taking the deal, is not an equitable reason to terminate the services.

xiaoma• 14 years ago

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.

dredmorbius2• 14 years ago

From the TOU (also at archive.org, linked from the above document): dispute is to be resolved by arbitration. More suckage.

kenmck3• 14 years ago

Thanks for the clarification Patrick. I was too busy fuming to explain.

tomjen3• 14 years ago

Class action law suit?

slig3• 14 years ago

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

gaoshan5• 14 years ago

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.

troels2• 14 years ago

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.

pmb5• 14 years ago

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.

pmb5• 14 years ago

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).

eropple• 14 years ago

If all you need is a shell plus LAMP, Dreamhost is pretty decent shared hosting. (Their Rails support apparently works, but Rails-using customers seem to have a tendency to suck up a lot of resources that other people could be using more moderately.)

slig3• 14 years ago

I've been very happy with WebFaction for a couple of small websites.

debacle• 14 years ago

MediaLayer is good, but I've never seen a reason not to shell out the extra $10 a month for a VPS.

evanwalsh• 14 years ago

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

thirdhaf• 14 years ago

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.

marquis• 14 years ago

Happy with http://vpslink.com (XEN) for small services, and Linode for bigger things.

mileswu2• 14 years ago

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

RyanMcGreal• 14 years ago

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.

jdlshore• 14 years ago

nearlyfreespeech.net is perfect for this sort of thing.

icebraining• 14 years ago

NearlyFreeSpeech is very cheap and they even give you a shell with gcc (and I've run uploaded and run Go apps). They do require the applications to be static or CGI, though.

resplin• 14 years ago

I really like working with Bluehost (http://www.bluehost.com/). They are amazingly cheap shared hosting plans targeted at non-administrators, but if you are willing to provide a copy of your government ID (as insurance against naughtiness) they will provide shell access. Their admins are very accommodating about letting me run my own stuff as long as it won't impact other users of the server.

freehunter2• 14 years ago

I host three sites on Linode, lowest plan at $20/mo. They're excellent, as just about everyone can tell you. It's a full install of a Linux distro of your choosing, any software you want. It's as good as having a Linux machine sitting in your office.

However, $20/mo might not be the lowest price you can find for two low-traffic sites.

edit - I should point out, I host three low traffic sites on one low-end Linode instance, so that' $20/mo flat for three sites. I also use it for compiling code (I can compile code anywhere from my phone!) and testing out new features for various bits of software, so it has more use than just hosting.

wensheng2• 14 years ago

For VPS, I recommend burst.net, specifically their XEN 1Gb ram plan. Their price structure is kinda strange, 0.5G is $7.95, 1G is $12.95, 1.5G is 24.95. So 1G plan is a no brainer. I have 2 of these, one in their PA Datacenter, the other in CA.

http://www.burst.net/xenvps.shtml

DASD• 14 years ago

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.

berodam• 14 years ago

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

cpher• 14 years ago

Just to chime in with everyone else...I'm in the same boat. VC2/3 since Sept/2005. I started with them because they were the only host to offer Rails support. Now, my most pressing need is email support--transferring the main accounts, so that gmail can POP them off the accounts.

Edit: Obviously, any serious application would have been migrated off of Joyent long ago, but many of us have several small apps (Rails, Wordpress, etc) along with email accounts. I think it's more of an issue of migrating many small apps rather than a single large app.

I've used Slicehost (now Rackspace) successfully for a couple of years, but my pricing is probably terrible now. 256MB slice for $20/mth. I have a feeling I need to re-visit this...

mipapage• 14 years ago

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.

pmb5• 14 years ago

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."

brokentone• 14 years ago

Is this a promise, or a contract? It seems that if they want to renege on a contract that they ought to refund the entire amount.

colinshark• 14 years ago

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

bradleyjg3• 14 years ago

Contract damages aren't the price paid, they are the value received had the contract been honored. In this case that's probably considerably more.

jacques_chester6• 14 years ago

The customers don't want a refund (damages). They want "specific performance" -- ie that Joyent uphold their end of the bargain: lifetime service.

(IANAL, TINLA).

michaelbuckbee• 14 years ago

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?

mikeash17• 14 years ago

American Airlines started selling a lifetime pass in 1981, and is still honoring them today, although they're starting to crack down on certain abuses of the system.

MrMember• 14 years ago

For anyone interested, there was an interesting article on this subject published earlier this year.

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/05/business/la-fi-0506-...

rmc3• 14 years ago

Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, Hotmail, etc.

sadga• 14 years ago

They don't have lifetime accounts -- everyone pays the monthly fee ($0)

smackfu5• 14 years ago

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.

brucehart• 14 years ago

I bought an original Tivo with lifetime service in 1999 and I still use the subscription today. 6 or 7 years ago they offered a promotion that allowed you to transfer your lifetime service to a new HD unit and that device is still running. The service has cost me an average of $1.28/mo.

gadders• 14 years ago

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).

genwin• 14 years ago

I bought a lifetime gym membership long ago. The gym is (amazingly) still in business and still serves me.

blndcat4• 14 years ago

In the end shared hosting with Joyent wasn't very good. It was slow, it was clunky and had an air of neglect. I have one site remaining on it I think. Most of my sites are on Linode.

What was worse was that Joyent changed directions, decided its then current customers weren't profitable enough (my guess shared hosting = higher per head tech support costs) and basically stagnated the service while it introduced new services. I think they did this a couple of times, and it has always made me relunctant to recommend them to friends (even ones looking for cloud services).

Sigh I hope StrongSpace will still honour the lifetime part.

BTW for readers who think lifetime account holders are being greedy, the point of the accounts was that when TextDrive/Joyent needed extra capital to expand, they offered lifetime accounts in return for quite a bit of cash up front. In part, they are where they are due to this clever bit of fund raising.

hemancuso3• 14 years ago

Joyent will keep supporting their Strongspace customers [which we, ExpanDrive, provide the service for - Joyent provides the hardware for their lifetimers]

blndcat4• 14 years ago

Thanks Jeff for clearing this up

endersshadow3• 14 years ago

The real issue is, to paraphrase a football player, "What do lifetime mean?" Is it the lifetime of the product (typical in consumer goods), or was it the consumer's lifetime (i.e.-until they died)? If it was the consumer's lifetime, if they had a site where someone died and another person was going to take over, would we then be upset if Joyent started charging the successor?

Lifetime typically means expected life of the product (see: lifetime warranties). Death is really, really complicated, so I can't imagine anybody would actually tie their products to a consumer's death.

blndcat4• 14 years ago

If you look at the offer on the waybackmachine: http://web.archive.org/web/20060202181857/http://textdrive.c...

It has this Q&A item: How long is it good for? As long as we exist.

The footer states: a Joyent company

Nothing complicated, Joyent still exists. shrug

thesheep• 14 years ago

The original product specified that it was good for "as long as we [Joyent] exist". NOT for as long as that product exists.

mikeash17• 14 years ago

I assume they're giving everybody a refund of their purchase price, right? ...Right?

howeyc• 14 years ago

They should, but probably wont.

If you sell a service, but decide not to provide it you should refund the money. Judging from the comments most of HN assumes if you "attempt" to provide the service you can keep the money.

Yes, I get it's a losing proposition for Joyent to live up to their obligations. So what? You either live up to them, or refund the money, it's really that simple.

mikeash17• 14 years ago

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. If you want to charge for overages or enact caps, you don't get to call it "unlimited".

jacques_chester6• 14 years ago

Some customers don't want a refund. They want Joyent to perform its half of the contract.

ck2• 14 years ago

Every company that offers "lifetime" anything, seems to mean their lifetime, not yours.

I once had a lifetime free checking account, I still have the advertising flyers from when I got it.

Well they took that away from me last year too.

I guess they just count on you getting a lawyer and lawsuit being more of a hassle than you just walking away.

nemesisj• 14 years ago

"your lifetime service will end on October 31, 2012"

If you're writing that sentence and don't see a problem with it, there's no helping you. Look, many of us have been there and sold "free" things to early customers who become a pain later on, but you have to honor it. Better yet, never sell something "lifetime" without at least some kind of low recurring fee to cover nominal costs.

keithpeter2• 14 years ago

Thank you: just the idea of someone sitting down and typing that phrase in amazes me. Some kind of token refund and a slightly longer switch-over period could have turned this into a PR positive.

typicalrunt• 14 years ago

As annoyed as I am with all of it, I'm more interested to know how to move off of their products and services now.

My lifetime account is where I have several important email servers, and I don't know how to migrate them. All the email says is to contact Joyent about getting migrated to one of their other product offerings. However, if I am only given 2.5 months to sort all this stuff out, I DO NOT WANT to use Joyent services. I'd love to use GMail for Business, Linode or what have you, but I don't know where to start.

tracker1• 14 years ago

I tend to just use an IMAP mail client (like thunderbird) connect the old server, and new server, then copy from one to the other... this doesn't take care of multiple users and their accounts/passwords though.

gaoshan5• 14 years ago

Set up an IMAP connection, copy everything over to your local machine, connect via IMAP to your new mail host and move everything over to it. I usually use Gmail for Business but be aware that this now has a 10 user limit on the free account.

ubernostrum• 14 years ago

When Connector shut down, I switched to Fastmail, which had a nice little "fill in the credentials and press the button" migration process. Been with 'em ever since.

thelibrarian• 14 years ago

I too switched to FastMail a year or so ago for my email, as I found Joyent email to be slow and didn't have any spam filtering functionality. They have an IMAP/POP email importer which will suck in all your email and folders from you previous provider. Worked like a charm.

opendomain2• 14 years ago

I do not want to be a jerk here, but the only reason I joined was the promise of "lifetime" - they can NOT just cancel our accounts does it does not suit them. Please contact me webmaster @ opendomain ORG if you would like to join the class action lawsuit.

jackolas• 14 years ago

best of luck, if I was in the situation I'd definitely sue in small claims court.

opendomain2• 14 years ago

Wow! I have received over a dozen emails in the first hours that want to join in the lawsuit. We have enough to form an offical class and will be able to get Joyent to abide by the original terms. Please contact me soon if you want to participate!

joshe• 14 years ago

Had an account with them back around then because their site made them seem technically proficient, but dealing with their customer service was like dealing with bad sys admins - grudging help and lazy. There were also a lot of unfinished nooks and crannies in their system. An overall lack of craftsmanship and care. The email brought back not so fond memories and is indicative of their attitude in all their interactions. Partly you are paying for company culture and theirs is not good.

michaelhoffman7• 14 years ago

I wonder why Joyent thinks they can get away with this. "Q: How long is it good for? A: As long as we exist." seems to be a pretty good definition of "lifetime." I would think they could only get out of their promise via bankruptcy. Maybe Joyent is trying to substitute for legal bankruptcy with moral bankruptcy.

larrys3• 14 years ago

"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 this case but if a company was acquired the new company may have not acquired all the previous companies legal obligations but simply setup a new entity and assumed some of the assets, liabilities and obligations but not everything. When I sold a company that is how it was handled.).

_delirium2• 14 years ago

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).

mikeash17• 14 years ago

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.

TomGullen• 14 years ago

Had a similar experience with an old host, promised "lifetime price freeze". A couple of years later they started charging me more as they had 'moved me to a new server' which I fiercely contested. In the end we settled for a compromise.

Dylan16807• 14 years ago

Ridiculous, since the reason to get a new server is that it's cheaper per cycle/byte/watt.

sp332• 14 years ago

Someone already started a Google group for people to discuss where to move their hosting: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ex-joyeurs

timkeller• 14 years ago

> "...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.

gaoshan5• 14 years ago

They try to make it seem like we are a couple of dozen duffers who never really use the service anyway. What a gimmick.

mikeash17• 14 years ago

It's always amusing when companies (or people) contradict themselves to rationalize their decisions. The ongoing costs of this service are too large for us to sustain! By the way, only a few obscure people are using it so it will impact virtually nobody!

wmf4• 14 years ago

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.

robinbowes2• 14 years ago

Much suckage. Lifetime means lifetime. It wouldn't be too much out of the way to provide a small host for "lifetime" users. I have complained to joyent.

smackfu5• 14 years ago

I wonder why they are this dumb. It's like buying bad press. Did they really think this wouldn't get out and make them a mockery? Would it really cost that much to continue providing something to these people forever, so they wouldn't have to say the lifetime is over? Dumb dumb dumb.

robinbowes2• 14 years ago

BTW, I too have moved to the Solaris hosting.

patrickgzill• 14 years ago

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?

wmf4• 14 years ago

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.

slig3• 14 years ago

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

grandalf• 14 years ago

I've been warning people about Joyent for a few years now. A few years back I was using them for some hosting and they were dishonest about their shared filesystem issues.

ljoshua• 14 years ago

TextDrive was a great host back in the day (I signed up around 2004) and I was also happy with Joyent as well. They've obviously changed target markets since then, which is unfortunate, but I think the offer they made is certainly palatable and a sign of good will. All good things must come to an end, and then you go on to the next good company.

gexla2• 14 years ago

Dear Jones, we said "till death do us part" but you are now divorcing me. :(

In case you didn't get it, Jones is the name of the shared server that I'm on. ;)

btipling• 14 years ago

Split the company in two, one with lifetime accounts one without. One with lifetime accounts goes bankrupt immediately. Promise kept, goals achieved!

tomson3• 14 years ago

Outraged, too. Any suitable alternatives in sight?

tomson3• 14 years ago

Where is Dean Allen now that we need him?

keithpeter2• 14 years ago

He seems to have disappeared, apart from sporadic tweets. A quieter version of Mark Pilgrim and _why?.

Is this normal for successful Web entrepreneurs?

prodigal_erik• 14 years ago

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.

graue2• 14 years ago

Funny you mention that. My server with them (shared hosting, lifetime account) just had a two-day outage Monday through Wednesday and still isn't totally recovered.

cletus• 14 years ago

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...

holgate6• 14 years ago

Well, thanks for all your recent wisdom. Now all you need to do is travel back in time to 2004 and warn everyone that backing Dean Allen's little cottage-industry hosting venture will end in tears.

Karunamon• 14 years ago

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.

mikeash17• 14 years ago

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 out. Now that they're done reaping the benefits, they no longer want to hold up their part of the bargain... but why should we let them get away with that?

Letting companies get away with this is bad not only for the buyers, but also for the companies themselves. If you scare customers away from "lifetime" purchases by making it known that companies can get away with breaking their side of the agreement, you'll make it more difficult for them to use this useful tool.

Terretta• 14 years ago

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...

adrr• 14 years ago

Lots of companies including government do lifetime memberships and they aren't scams. I cat get lifetime fishing license with the state of california instead of paying $50 a year. I can get a lifetime pass to legoland here in california. REI has lifetime membership model, restaurants in my area offer lifetime drinks if you by a glass from them. These aren't charades and why do we always blame the victim?

phsr• 14 years ago

With REI, I think you need to re-buy the lifetime membership if you do not purchase anything at an REI store for an extended period of time (IIRC, it was a year)

wpietri3• 14 years ago

And let's forget buying stock. Unless a company goes bankrupt, thereby sinking all the shareholders, then every share sold must be honored.

willyt• 14 years ago

The customers have only 'fallen for it' if they decide not to enforce the contract.

wisty• 14 years ago

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.

rmc3• 14 years ago

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

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

smsm42• 14 years ago

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 the contract and have plan B - but that still means they are in breach, however high incentive they have to do it. I wonder if the lawsuits will follow...

weel3• 14 years ago

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?

drewmclellan2• 14 years ago

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 a completely plausible lifetime offering for a successful hosting company, 2) $200 is a low risk punt, and 3) these are good guys and I think they can realistically make a go of it

TextDrive was a success, now continues to be a success as Joyent, and 200 shared hosting accounts (the state of play when I signed up) should be trivial for them to provide - even if they outsource that obligation to another provider.

I know I wasn't wrong about them being good guys (they are), but that's why I'm bewildered by today's announcement.

It may not be economically viable for them to provide these services now, but it wasn't economically viable for them to start a hosting company until we backed it. That was the deal. Joyent has an obligation to keep these services online, and if that means they need to take a bit of a hit to do that, then that's what they need to do.

Otherwise, I'm unclear how anyone would trust them again.

kenmck3• 14 years ago

Exactly. I can and will be moving elsewhere. My three puny sites can hardly be making their servers tick over the most active only gets ~2000 uniques on a good month.

agravier• 14 years ago

> Otherwise, I'm unclear how anyone would trust them again.

You are giving the average customer way too much behavioral credit. Companies abuse confidence because they can get away with it, of course.

Isofarro7• 14 years ago

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 of lengthy outages that utterly destroyed it's reputation. Other Cpanel-powered hosts popped up, went under, merged, acquired, disappeared, reappeared, went down, never came back out.

Fast-forward to today, shared hosting is just a race-to-the-bottom barrel scraping. Margins are practically non-existent. Every kid with a bedroom computer has their own Reseller account and pretend they have their own hosting company. Pricing on that seems to be about $4 a year, but the quality is absolutely dire, and that's when the server is actually online.

Shared hosting is largely a dead industry today, it bottom-feeds because their top-end audience grew into dedicated servers, and their average and above average end customers are comfortable running their own cheap VPS. Safe in the knowledge that it's very much harder for another customer to take down everyone's website.

Shared hosting is no longer a sustainable business model. You got a great ride for your money, you got a very good deal. Now it's time to move on.

Grab yourself a VPS, and take a step up to the next curve on the online hosting technology stack. It's well past time. Good quality shared hosting, with great support is getting more and more expensive, because the market for it is dwindling down to people who can't or won't take the step up towards VPS/Dedicated servers - that means the support cost per customer rises. And that isn't a sustainable process.

If the average monthly price you paid for good quality hosting on TextDrive/Joyent is under $10 because of these packages, well done, you got a tremendously good deal. How would you have rated the service you received before you received the email/message? Think about that - consider if the support/service you received related to the per month price you've paid.

Now go out and find a web hosting offer that will give you the same quality of service, for the same monthly price - and switch to that. I get a feeling, apart from special offers that will surface because of this, you'll be hard-pressed to find an equivalent.

But seriously people, "lifetime" and "unlimited" are the two emptiest words in the language of web resource offers. You know that. I'd feel sad for you if you only got 1 years hosting for your $200 for such features.

But if you got 8 years for your initial outlay, and you still feel you deserve more... that's a text-book example of bottom-feeding. Quite the sort of customer a web hosting company wouldn't miss.

A class action? That would be amusing.

tripzilch2• 14 years ago

So, what is it? I'm hearing different amounts in these threads, $200, $500 and further down even someone saying they paid $1399 for a hosting contract?

xenophanes• 14 years ago

Reminds me of Google Fiber offering free internet forever for a $300 install fee. I would trust that more if they would charge $5/month.

Stratoscope• 14 years ago

Except Google Fiber doesn't offer that. The $300 fee covers "at least 7 years", a much more honest proposition.

Also, this is not the 1Gb/1Gb service you get for $70/month, it's only 5Mb/1Mb. So, it's not so costly for them to provide it, and there's plenty of room for people to talk themselves into upgrading to the faster service.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fiber

xtracto• 14 years ago

Meh, it is nothing new and even governments do it. For example, my mother had a "lifetime visa" from the USA, which lasted maybe for 10 years. Some years ago she had to change her "lifetime" visa for a 10 year visa (standard Laser visa).

I guess "dishonoring" contracts might be a cultural thing.

rdl2• 14 years ago

The issue is counterparty risk, generally.

Don't buy something, especially something with an ongoing or operations component, from someone you don't trust. I think J.P. Morgan's famous quote is instructive.

There's nothing wrong with using long-term (perpetual is very long term) liability to finance growth. That's what happens when you sell equity in a start-up -- it's dead anyway if you can't launch, so that you'll eventually be paying dividends to shareholders (or otherwise returning capital to them) is often a reasonable trade. Financing early customers the same way makes sense; if you have to sell a unit of product now at a perpetual loss, you can compute the lifetime cost of that; for instance, giving pg a free lifetime email account ($500/yr) if that brings you 10k customers at $500/yr is probably a worthwhile strategy for a new high-end email hosting service.

Xcelerate• 14 years ago

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 sure to NEVER bring you any of my business. The fact that you think it's okay to lie to your customers, and then blame THEM for not providing "additional revenue" is absolutely horrible. Looking at your profile it appears Google's "Don't be evil" motto would have made something of an impression on you, but I guess not.

Simple facts:

    * Joyent made a promise for a service
    * Joyent broke that promise

And yet you blame the customer?

ceejayoz5• 14 years ago

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.

tripzilch2• 14 years ago

> It never ceases to amaze me how many people "fall" for this "lifetime" pricing model.

While I agree that a "lifetime" or "unlimited X" pricing model will nearly always end up unsustainable, I think you've got your conclusion the wrong way around:

It never surprises me to see how many business end up shooting themselves in the foot, offering a "lifetime" pricing model early on.

Because really, you can't seriously take the business' side in this, when they don't make up on their promises. Doing that is wrong and dishonest.

The customer might not have been very realistic in their expectations, but the business actually broke their promise.

IMO the former is merely not very smart, while the latter is actually wrong.

buntar• 14 years ago

Dear Joyent

You got me:

"We've been analyzing customer usage of Joyent’s systems and noticed that you are one of the few customers that are still on our early products and have not migrated to our new platform, the Joyent Cloud."

So sorry about not appreciating enough your new platform because " Everyone that’s moved to our new cloud infrastructure has been pleased with the results".

About the whole "lifetime" ("As long as we exist.") thing ... Stupid me. I never get that. I mean that was meant metaphorically, right, like in marriages?

Ok then, you divorced me. Thanks that I can still sleep under your roof for one and a half month.

And yes: You keep the house. And the money. I keep my files.

I think, we can call this a true a win-win situation. Sorry, I mean "win-win".

Sincerely.

phearlez2• 14 years ago

Two and a half months, actually. Which is still a lot less than the lifetime we were promised (unless you're a fruitfly or something, I guess) but you have a little longer to migrate your stuff.

raganwald2• 14 years ago

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."

brey• 14 years ago

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.

mikeash17• 14 years ago

I'd think that such a warranty would be implied. It's a standard expectation that if you can't deliver what a customer paid for, you refund their money. If it's an ongoing service, then you can prorate the refund... but for a lifetime service, they've always used 0% of it and should thus get a 100% refund.

raganwald2• 14 years ago

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."

weel3• 14 years ago

Or better yet, the current annual price of the plan divided by the current yield on British consols.

port_rhombus• 14 years ago

Seriously though, the printout I have from March 29, 2006 of their Mixed Grill offer says "One-time payment of $499" and "How long is it good for? As long as we exist."

That constitutes a contract which they are clearly trying very hard to ignore. It seems so petty given their success, available resources, and the very manageable limited bandwidth and quota'd storage space us lifetime customers are allocated.

thirdstation• 14 years ago

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.

gaoshan5• 14 years ago

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).

velcrovan• 14 years ago

VC here...How did you get this? Did it come in response to a support ticket? Did you ask them for a full refund? Is half of your original investment $100 or more like $1000?

gaoshan5• 14 years ago

I asked for a full refund. They came back with "half".

tomson3• 14 years ago

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

One disgruntled VC200

obiefernandez• 14 years ago

Here's the answer you'll get if you write to their support complaining about the change:

Hi Obie,

As often happens in the software business, vendors “end of life” older platforms and migrate customers to new versions or platforms. The service you purchased a “lifetime subscription” to will no longer be supported or available from Joyent. On the other hand, we appreciate and value your business as an early customer. As such, we have created special offers specifically for you to make this transition as easy as possible. Details and promo codes were provided to you in the email.

I hope you will be able to take us up on the offer and see the benefits of our new platform.

Thanks,

------------------ Peter Yorke Senior Solutions Architect JoyentCloud.com

holgate6• 14 years ago

That's the boilerplate that the support desk is sending out to everyone.

I suppose the question to ask is this: "Were you lying back in 2006 when you said the offer was good '[a]s long as we exist', or are you lying now? Or did you decide to renege on your promise somewhere in-between?"

You'll get the same boilerplate response, but it'll be on record.

falava3• 14 years ago

I have obtained 50% refund from the support desk by replying to the sunset email and asking for it.

This morning I found this Jason Hoffman post about the EOL and a possible refund here and added to my response email: http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=240955#p240955

In my case and theirs, I consider this partial refund ok because I have been using his service 8 years and now I will move my small sites to a cheaper host.

michaelhoffman7• 14 years ago

In that situation I might write back:

Dear Peter,

Thank you for your "message." I find your breach of contract totally "unacceptable" and I will see you in "court."

Michael

hboon2• 14 years ago

I wrote back several words with a link http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=64656#p64656 as well as a screenshot like http://cl.ly/image/2y3k0x3p3a0v. Let's see where that brings us.

forgotAgain• 14 years ago

To anyone thinking of Joyent for cloud services: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, ...

danyork• 14 years ago

Joyent seems to be doing some general housecleaning... I received a similar notice (same first paragraphs) related to the closure of their http://no.de/ Node.js hosting service:

----

Joyent is retiring the No.de service. If, as a Node.js developer, you prefer a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, we suggest that you consider our third-party partner, Nodejitsu, who offers a Node.js PaaS that runs on Joyent. Joyent continues to provide an ideal cloud infrastructure to run your Node.js applications, with performance and debugging tools that no other cloud provides. Sign up for a free trial on Nodejitsu (www.nodejitsu.com) or take advantage of Joyent Cloud's 30-Day Free Trial using this promotional code.

----

officemonkey• 14 years ago

The fact that I got a good deal for hosting in retrospect is irrelevant. Joyent offered lifetime service in exchange for a large payment up front. It wasn't just a one time deal they regretted. They made lifetime offers on numerous occasions. It was their business model at the time, no one forced them.

Here's a very easy solution for Joyent.

Refund my money. My payment was for lifetime service. Pay me back and we'll call it quits.

NateEag2• 14 years ago

I'm another Mixed Grill customer, currently on a shared Solaris box.

When I bought it, I knew it was a gamble, and with the $500 spread over 6.5ish years, it's not a terrible ROI.

I assumed I'd lose out due to the company eventually folding, though. "As long as we exist" seemed pretty straightforward, and what I knew about them didn't leave me believing that they'd just pull the plug like this.

I've updated their Wikipedia page with a short section that I believe summarizes the situation accurately and factually, without letting my emotions creep in too much - if anyone cares to edit it, have at it. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Joyent

Joyent, I'm disappointed. You had a few memorable tech disasters, but never before did I personally experience ill will from you. I had begun to trust you guys.

justinhj• 14 years ago

This reminds me I bought a lifetime license for Visual Studio in the 90's. Less than a year later they revoked it ans esent q cheque for $50 and a copy of Visual Java

po2• 14 years ago

Looks like Jason Hoffman has stepped into the forums to explain the reasoning behind their decision and do some damage control:

http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=240955#p240955

They probably should have done that on the original letter.

rdl2• 14 years ago

Wow. Either Joyent is financially doomed on its own (and is trying to cut costs), or is just really stupid.

EOLing an old lifetime product with high support costs makes sense. What they should have done was moved the "small number of customers" using Lifetime service onto a new lifetime platform using their shared hosting platform. The plan they're offering for a year seems like an adequate replacement -- the cost of providing that low tier of service forever is probably not much more than the cost of providing it for a year.

Maybe make it opt-in, so inactive accounts don't spin up on the new platform, and provide some higher level of service at a discount (so, instead of a $50/yr cloud plan for free, you could optionally get a $250/yr plan for $150/yr.)

blues• 14 years ago

"There's a sucker born every minute" -- usually attributed to P. T. Barnum. The people who got sucked into buying into this "Joyent ending ‘lifetime’ hosting accounts" hustle probably got the greatest bargain of their lives. I'll bet they were mostly young folks, ever chasing after that proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow (although some never quit). Hoping for endless service with no further incentive for the provider. What a priceless lesson at such a small cost! This company has actually taught one of life's great lessons for a truly paltry sum!

Anyway, here's what I do: I register my domains at nearlyfreespeech.net. They have a somewhat limited number of different TLDs available, and at about $9 per year, are not cheap (or "free"), but certainly not exorbitant. But their integrity is rock-solid. One time I let my domain expire for a couple weeks, an alarming circumstance. But they restored it for free after I simply payed the fee (this can only work for a limited time, of course). My old (and reliable) previous host and registrar would have charged me about $200 to get it back! So the $9 is like cheap insurance.

I use asmallorange.com as my host. They charge as little as $35 per YEAR, with $0.50 per GB per month for additional bandwidth. (Both of these hosts are "pay as you go.") So if I ever have a disagreement with my host, they cannot mess with my domain name! Also, my registrar uses FreeBSD servers, while my host uses Linux, and I don’t want to deal with FreeBSD (it’s probably more stable than Linux, but I know nothing about how to use it). The smallorange service (running on Linux) is chock-full of great features, including Cpanel. They have a feature inside their Cpanel that one-click installs things like WordPress, and I used it. But I chose a one-click install password that it allowed, but that the rest of Cpanel would not allow, and that lead to problems. But their customer service was right there for me, and they immediately cleared it up. Hope this doesn't sound spammy. The main point is, if you really want service, pay as you go is the way to get it. It worked great for me.

fingerprinter• 14 years ago

I have quite a few static sites on them right now (personal, friends and family). Looking for a reasonable host that won't cost a bunch. Any recommendations?

ksec• 14 years ago

They could have just refund ALL of those money as credits for JoyentCloud. Would this be a better solution?

So you essentially got "x" years of hosting plus Those money back as credits.

cct• 14 years ago

This is fraud, no contest. The real question is what's the best way to deal with it. 1. Social pressure to re-instate equivalent service (1.5gb for me) 2. numerous small claims court applications (full refund + migration costs/damages) 3. Class action (similar to above).

To make any of them work to full effect, we'd probably have to band together? Any argument as to which method is preferred? CCT

falava3• 14 years ago

If you are a VC/MG/3ML like me, I think you can ask support for a partial refund. I did it, now let's see...

Jason Hoffman says that and other interesting things about the EOL here (read all of his posts):

http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=240955#p240955

NateEag2• 14 years ago

For anyone who's interested, a "Money back or five free years of your own virtual server" offer has been posted by Jason Hoffman: http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?id=33682

It doesn't come close to honoring the "as long as we exist" that we bought in for, but it's a lot better than the starting position, and Jason is talking a little about why we're being cut.

(From what I can see, it looks like cutting the lifers may have been a requirement of some of the recent VC investors. That's me reading between the lines a bit, though.)

mgrimes• 14 years ago

My two cents: http://stateful.net/joyent-refugee/

Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts

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