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Comment by holgate | Hacker News Reader

You're operating on incomplete information. The subsequent lifetime plans offered between 2004-2007 cost considerably more than $200, and most of the original VC200 paid more later on, following the Joyent-Textdrive merger/acquisition, to upgrade to larger lifetime packages and additional services. Scroll down and you'll find users whose per-month equivalent is comparable to a bottom-end Linode VPS.

Judging from Twitter and forum discussions today, most of the remaining lifetime customers use other hosts for many projects, but retain their Joyent packages for sites with relatively minimal requirements: non-profits, simple personal sites, etc. What they paid for wasn't server specs or even the quality of service: it was the explicit promise, in return for paying a chunk of change up-front, of not having to think about hosting options or plan a migration while Joyent remained in business. You can't simply apply a per-month calculation for that.

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"Scroll down and you'll find users whose per-month equivalent is comparable to a bottom-end Linode VPS."

They are objecting to equivalently paying -- at worst -- bottom-end Linode VPS prices for web hosting. That's why I have this bemused look on my face.

Not really -- they're objecting to having invested in the early stages of a company in good faith that the company would keep its promises. If they wanted dirt-cheap shared hosting, there were plenty of other ways to get it, even at the time (1and1's three-year free deal comes to mind). Most of the people I know who still use their lifetime accounts use them for hosting small static sites, e-mail, et cetera, with the specific goal of "not having to think about hosting".

That's what they were buying. And they're getting screwed out of it.

Exactly. The founding story goes something like this: Dean Allen had built a CMS (TextPattern) and he, along with other TextPattern users, wanted a hosting provider that would support it in a no-hassle way. He couldn't find one that fit his needs, so decided to create his own; after discussing and rejecting formal VC methods, he turned instead to his userbase with "an opportunity to acquire a piece of TextDrive at its inception, and to benefit from its future success in perpetuity."

Jason Hoffman, Joyent's CTO, whose name appeared at the bottom of today's "sunset" emails, was there when all that happened.

So as an investor, you'd prefer that the company you invested in continued offering a loss-making service until they went into bankruptcy? Rather than allowing them to just shut it down and concentrate on more sustainable business offerings?

That strikes me as the kind of investor a company wouldn't want.

Great, you bootstrapped a company, and they used those funds to grow. And in return all you got was a shared hosting account that's lasted about 8 years. You should have gone with the options - that's where the real money for investors comes from.

And VCs know the vast majority of startups fail. Some spectacularly fail or succeed, some run out of funds, some pivot, some change direction, and some just grow into sustainable businesses. This is one of the latter.

Blame both founders for their lack of vision - in not seeing shared-hosting as a dead-end business model, which was clearly evident round abou 2006. But don't blame the business for making the right decision to close down a non-performing service.

I dispute your premise that the lifetime plans somehow threaten Joyent's existence as a going concern; if the infrastructure of the lifetime services is difficult to support within Joyent's current business, I'd prefer that they honour the spirit of their promise instead of pretending that they promised something different and hoping that lifetime customers go away.

And again, I'd suggest that you get working on that time machine, because your powers of 20/20 hindsight are truly remarkable.

You don't get it. TextDrive was founded and sold on a vision.

Imagine what will happen if in a few years Dalton decides to stick ads all over App.net and send threatening letters to developers in the name of "curating the user experience". That's where the righteous indignation is coming from.

Correct, I don't get it. You bought into a vision that clearly makes no sense today, but didn't make much sense back in 2004. The reward for that investment was a shared-hosting account, which has kept running for 8 years.

There seems to be a confusion about whether you lifers have paid up-front for a long term shared-hosting account or whether you are investors into the business. If you are investors, you should probably have taken options, rather than a free shared-hosting account.

"Imagine what will happen if in a few years Dalton decides to stick ads all over App.net and send threatening letters to developers in the name of "curating the user experience". That's where the righteous indignation is coming from."

Then I don't renew my $100 a year developer account and walk away. I'm not investing in the company, I'm paying for a service that's on offer. When I'm not happy with the service I decide to no longer spend any more money there.

Whether it makes sense or not is beside the point. How much value we got is beside the point (the quality was such shit I wrote it off a long time ago incidentally).

The point I was trying to impart to you is that this was not just slimy bottom-of-the-barrel shared hosting marketing. The promise really was made in good faith and should be honored.

And wrt to App.net, fine, you are a stoic Buddhist individual. But I guarantee you that if that happens, people will fucking crucify him.

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