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Comment by enduser | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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...)

>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.

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.

>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.

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