Also I think I have learned from this thread that 'lifetime' service packages suck because after the company closes that deal they have absolutely no incentive whatsoever to do anything more for you as you've basically just agreed to become a burden for them forever.
They should pull up the old contract, find out exactly what can be done to either terminate or transition people to the new services and get it over with. This seems like they're just letting the issue run off the rails and then when people complain that a server is down an extended period of time, a server that they paid a lifetime membership fee for, they start spouting off that these people are whiny freeloaders.
If the servers are old and rickety, migrate them to the lowest level of your new service for the same cost as what the person paid for initially, given that they've already paid in full, this would put the customer cost at $0. If you don't want to do that, then maintain the old servers and give them as much love as you would your other customers. That love includes not getting pissy in public about people whining over "free" servers, especially when they _weren't free_.
The overal quality of their (Hurricane Electric, not Linode) operation is poor, historically they have been lax on shady people colo'ing rack space in Fremont (google hurricane electric mccolo), HE-1 is full and so little room for expansion and its on a fault line.
I've NEVER had any of these problems in Newark (which is Linode's geographically local DC as they are in NJ) or London.
However I chose Fremont because it's the closest datacentre they have to Australia. Most of my readers are here.
(see http://www.linode.com/speedtest/ for pingable hostnames of servers in each DC + speedtests)
If you do want to move, you can put in a ticket and they can move you between DC's with no downtime I believe or just replicate your instance and switch IP's.
However, I've learnt, and hopefully have others, that having everything in one basket isn't the best option, even with how excellent Linode are, they are at the mercy of HE etc.
So now we have a split between Fremont, Dallas & Newark.
It's worked pretty well, we are most happy.
Anyone running a large app or site would do well to run multiple systems with Linode across multiple sites where possible.
Are you even still offering regular (not “cloud”) web hosting? I can't find it on Joyent's site anymore; it seems as if the Shared Accelerator plans are discontinued, too.
[1]: http://wiki.joyent.com/shared:kb:start
Edit: Found it. This is the page that implies that TextDrive users have needed to wait for a “golden ticket” to be offered to them: http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20090305040858/http://wiki....
And that wiki has up-to-date information on migrating from TextDrive to what are apparently now called “Shared SmartMachines” (formerly Shared Accelerators). And that page finally does resolve the question of whether we need to contact them or wait to be contacted: We do need to ask for a golden ticket, not just wait for it.
That's pretty well buried. Joyent really should send out a mass email to all TextDrive users asking us to upgrade, telling us exactly what effect it would have on our billing, and telling us exactly what we need to do.
It's still unclear whether, in the special case of Howe, we still need to ask for golden tickets, or all Howe users are being migrated to Shared SmartMachines without having to ask. The support post:
http://help.joyent.com/index.php?pg=forums.posts&id=949
implies that they are rebuilding Howe, which implies that we will not simply be migrated to a Shared SmartMachine as a result of the failure (we still would need to ask), but they have not directly said.
The one remaining worry I have is that there's nothing on the main Joyent site about Shared SmartMachines. It seems like they're inviting users of one deprecated service to migrate to another deprecated service.