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Comment by jasonhoffman | Hacker News Reader

I get the frustration. I really do and I apologize for any bump like this. I'm the founder of those old textdrive "share hosting" servers (they really have nothing to do with Joyent's current product line). These servers are ~6 years old and they're largely populated by "lifetime" customers who have tricked out various bits of their accounts enough that an automated migration has been basically impossible. We've been telling everyone for 3 years to really get off of them, we've been offering free upgrades for 4 years, including you btw, you got a free upgrade back in Nov 2007, and there's even support tickets detailing it (which you've participated on). So now we're piecing together everything that was left but those good ole FreeBSD UFS file systems take awhile.

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Offering a transition from FreeBSD to Solaris that requires the effort of the customer is not free. Asking a customer who knows FreeBSD to take on administration of a Solaris virtual server for your convenience is not reasonable.

You are offering an unacceptable level of service to customers who have supported and recommended you from your early days. You were paid in advance for a lifetime of service. I took you on your word and offered lifetime hosting to friends with small websites for small businesses. If you can't make good on your agreements, I will eat the cost of moving these sites to Rackspace Cloud. I can't risk another 54 hours of downtime.

With proper backups and a fresh server it should not take 54 hours to get back online.

For example, read the comments below from quintinsykes and chuckmcknight.

Seems like the lesson for you here is: never give free hosting, people feel terribly entitled once they have it and their negative feedback may cause trouble in your actual products.

I paid $400 for lifetime service via the vc2 drive sometime in mid 2005. I got about 2.5 years of usable service before I completely abandoned textdrive. An effective rate of $160/yr for really marginal shared hosting.

I currently pay ~$215/year for a linode account.

I will continue to pay for linode.

The hosting is not free. It was paid for in advance.

Paid in advance is still free on a month-to-month basis. That's what I meant.

Paying for a service forever in advance is a devious mis-alignment of incentives. The customer will feel that they are owed everything. The business of it won't work out.

As I said, the lesson is, don't give shit for free - even for an initial payment. Ongoing services need to be paid for in an ongoing manner.

To even call this "Joyent" is misleading.

The packing system is the same, it's BSD userland. The paths are the same. Everything is the same. The kernel shouldn't matter. And if you had told support that you wanted us to just migrate you because nothing was out of the ordinary, what would they have done? They would have migrated you ....

And this has been quite a good deal for you. The logic of moving from something that costs you nothing to something that does costs you something is interesting.

>And this has been quite a good deal for you. The logic of moving from something that costs you nothing to something that does costs you something is interesting.

Downtime costs him. So much so that he's willing to pay for uptime.

Also, it didn't cost him "nothing". He paid for service. It wasn't free.

Your reply sounds like you don't value him as a customer anymore because he's not giving you money anymore. Nobody forced textdrive into offering the "lifetime" package. You should treat him like a valued old customer, rather than calling his logic "interesting".

> Your reply sounds like you don't value him as a customer anymore because he's not giving you money anymore.

I think you mean: replies.

I don't think that there's anything weird or "interesting" about the logic of moving from unreliable hosting to something more costly but more reliable. (Also, in the context of hosting service, I don't really think it's accurate to say it "costs you nothing" if it suffers a multi-day outage while you have customer servers hosted on it...)

>To even call this "Joyent" is misleading.

Wait, what? Who owns and operates the servers?

Joyent are the ones that have been processing my credit card every month for the last few years. What a fantastic deal this is, I get to pay $15/month and you get to laugh and comment on forums as thou this is a minor hiccup. I've built data centers faster than youve restored a server. sIX days and counting and you write as though I have been freeloading. Wonder if the English word "wanker" is known to you.

Jason - I don't know you, but you're making a big mistake by constantly referring to his service as 'free'. It isn't free, it's paid for. From a customer perspective, you should consider his account as 'paid in full'.

I completely understand that he's 'getting a great deal', and that he isn't currently paying you anything, and that he may well have lasted as a customer longer than you expected, but your company offered lifetime service for a fixed cost, and he bought it. As I understand it, this was to bootstrap your later efforts.

To constantly demean his position is as insulting to him as it is to your integrity. While you may feel like you're in the right here, I can guarantee that you've lost at least one potential customer, because I will not be using Joyent. I'm guessing that running potential customers away isn't your intent here so please, don't do yourself any further harm.

Is the personal account information for the submitting individual really necessary for your point? Did the submitter give you permission to tell us about his ticket history and account actions?

Although relatively harmless, it seems like planting the seed to a disregard for privacy.

Agreed. He really crossed a line on that one. Standard operating procedure should be to NEVER reveal ANY information about a customer, even whether or not they are customers.

One more reason to shy away from Joyent.

Edit - Jed from Linode?! Hey! You sir are my favourite support person to reach, yet I rarely get you anymore.

He didn't ask. My past interaction with them is irrelevant, because I only commented on their tickets enough to determine that it would take hours of my time and recurring hours of administration to take them up on their "free" offer. I decided to stay with the service I had paid for in advance.

What I don't understand is that if the servers are 6 years old, why not migrate the old bad hardware to exactly the same OS, as virtual machines running under the virtualization platform of your choice?

A 6 year old server would have a max RAM capacity of say 32GB, you can get a newish 64GB RAM system for what, $3k or so?

In such a case, migration is basically a few shell scripts plus rsync from old hardware to new VM. You rsync a couple of times until the rsync takes very little time, then turn off services; do a final rsync; turn on services on the new VM, swap IP addresses and test.

You can even run FreeBSD/Xen on top of Solaris XVM, right?

"lifetime" textdrive customer here. I don't ever remember getting a "free" upgrade. I was just offered a $45/month upgrade for a joyent smartmachine, but while a large discount, is not 'free'.

I would be interested in getting my account into a virtual env but I can't really justify paying $45/month at this moment...what are my options?

Free upgrade sounds fine - when were these offered, and how would a person take advantage? I have one of the aforementioned permanent accounts (on jervis, even) and if migrating to a new server means that my site is less likely to fall over, I certainly would do it. However, I just dug through all the emails I ever received from Joyent or Textdrive, and none of them mentioned migrating to another server for free. Lots of stuff about how I could pay more to have more, but since things are basically fine for me (running http://imprompt.us and http://tracyfood.com both of which are low-bandwidth vanilla wordpress sites), I ignored all of that.

tl;dr: how can I go about moving my stuff? To where? And why am I in this handbasket?

oh dude, I have one of those lifetime accounts. Last summer, I looked into how to migrate, but I got lost in outdated pages. Can you drop some links in this thread?

Maybe you can shut down jervis.textdrive.com if I migrate my account :)

Yes, you can contact support at help.joyent.com and they'll move your old textdrive account from jervis.

I've got a lifetime account on davie.textdrive.com and I've been waiting for my "golden ticket" for a couple years now. I never got any decent communication from joyent and everything still works, so I was disinclined to make trouble for myself. I'd be happy to migrate if it's not a lot of work.

It will take them at six days to do it and you won't have any domain or email in that time, but sure trust yourself to a joyent experience

Not till they move mine too, but this thread has reminded me to get the migration done.

I am not a lifetime customer, I pay $15/month. I have never received a migration offer and I don't have a "tricked out" account. I only really care about my email and I don't have any now for four days. Fool that I am my registrar has the email of record being the one hosted by joyent so I cant even move until you get my email up and running. I don't think you can even begin to feel my frustration. Despite the new status last night, saying everything is back up for most people, I am not. The Timeliness of support responses is also a joke, my companies email has been down for four days and you appear to be working 9 to 5 on the issue.

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