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TextDrive is Back

joyent.com

37 pointszdw29 comments

A story of corporate communication amateur hour; So i have to read on HN that my textdrive/joyent hosting is stopping. Bit pissed i write an email to support that i'd like more time to move stuff and that a refund would be nice. I get a canned reply with a repeat of the email mentioned on HN. Then on their support forums the Joyent president suddenly is all helpful and grants everyone refunds. we'll have to ask/haggle with support about it though. So i email support again quoting their fearless leader. This time the support staff promptly grants me a refund (which i haven't heard or seen anything about since i should add). I'm happy enough with that outcome for now though and start moving all my sites to other hosting options. Fast forward to today (about a week later). Again on HN (still not on that mailing list it seems) i have to read that textdrive is restarting after all (tada!) and we can keep our precious hosting accounts running. Wow, thanks good timing as well. Can i still get my refund and get the f out though?

Note to budding entrepreneurs; don't do this.

I requested that they honor the refund offer (as I'd already started migrating away, and as they've destroyed any remaining trust I had in them.) I just received the reply:

We are sorry for the inconvenience our change in plans has caused. This is the only option available. We will continue to honor your original Lifetime purchase, and you will continue to receive hosting services from TextDrive.

So, no, we can't get our refunds and get the f out. I'm deeply unhappy with how they've handled this, start to end. (I too failed to receive any of the mass mail-outs.)

Yeah this isn't going well: http://forum.textdrive.com/viewtopic.php?pid=242571

Based on the history of the last 8 years, I have to assume that this is purely based on Dean Allen having been out of the picture for years, but now feeling some sense of duty to try to straighten things out based on his involvement in the original pitches way back when.

I'm wondering this as well. But the bigger question on my mind is whether I want to stay with them. I am almost finished migrating my data off of the hosts and onto Google Apps. I'm not going to undo what I just did, so I don't see any reason to keep my lifetime accounts.

I no longer trust them to offer a similar shared hosting service a) reliably and b) actually lifetime. It was probably never a good idea to finance a company this way and it's certainly not a good idea to spin this off into a new company with zero paying customers but actual real life costs that can no longer be written off as a cost of doing business. How long before this new Textdrive folds? 5 years, 6 months?

Someone please correct me if I am wrong, but by relaunching as a separate company from Joyent, it opens up the ability to truly shut down the service and avoid all of the lawsuits.

Remember that the key wording was "as long as the company exists". Once the spinoff is complete, TextDrive can be shut down while Joyent continues on.

Perhaps I am too cynical, but I see no other reason to jump through all of these hoops and separate.

I don't think this was ever about Joyent wanting to escape their lifetime hosting obligation. It was more about them not wanting to be in the shared hosting business - they don't want to do that work. They still don't want to be in that business, but they old founder has offered to come back and do it. All it will cost them is a little money, which is not so much when they think of all the damage this publicity could cause their business in years to come.

Sure, but all it was really costing them in the first place was infrastructure and support costs.

Is the new Textdrive supposed to be financially self-sufficient? That doesn't seem possibly. Even if Joyent gives them all the hardware and bandwidth for free, who is going to pay for the support and maintenance? The handful of paying shared hosting customers?

This is one of my main concerns too. What's the business plan here? How can I trust "lifetime" will mean something more than a year or two? As much as I appreciate Dean stepping in, it may be too late.

Obviously they will have to build a real business. They will have the incentive to do it this way though.

Fair enough, but it seems like it would be hard to build a shared hosting business even without having to support a bunch of non-paying customers from day 1.

I think you are being too cynical. IMHO, I don't think the lawsuits were a serious threat or a factor in this decision. They (obviously) believe they have the right to shut down the service regardless of who owns it.

ding!

I already finished migrating off of my TD lifetime account and onto WebFaction. I don't see why I should put my sites back on TD. So I guess my TD lifetime account is a spare, for now. I'm sort of glad to hear they're doing the right thing, but they did it the wrong way.

I wonder what this means to the 5-year hosting or full refund offer given to lifetime account holders.

I submitted it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4410682

It means those offers have been withdrawn. They are no longer an available option. (I just heard back from support.)

I was told different, by support. I could chose between the 5 year offer, or TextDrive.

Reading the forum thread, the refund has been withdrawn - which is a really crappy thing to do to the people who had already accepted that offer.

While I would like to beleive that they will fix all the problems, my previouse experience with Joyent tells me that this may be an attempt to try to get away from the a lawsuit.

I posted a coment here two weeks ago [1] and I received dozens of responses - if anyone would like to join the class action to ensure our rights are not lost please conact me. I am not really interested in lawyers - I hope we can work something out.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4392052

Im not defending the ridiculous path they took to get here, but how could you have grounds for a lawsuit now that they are holding up their end of the original bargain?

Here's the e-mail that was sent out:

[Name],

If we haven't met, I'm Dean Allen, a founder of TextDrive, the shared hosting company started by Jason Hoffman and me in 2004. I'm also a founder and erstwhile President of Joyent, which some time ago merged with TextDrive, though I haven't been active with that company for a while.

If we have met, I hope it went okay.

A couple of weeks ago I received, at the same time as Joyent’s shared hosting customers, a message announcing an end to support for shared hosting, affecting customers who’ve been with us for years, some of whom invested in accounts we had intended to support for the rest of the life of the company. The announcement struck many as abrupt. Some took it to be an abandonment of, if not an insult to, your good faith, written in marketing and lawyer speak.

I soon spoke with my friend Jason, who by then was deluged with abusive emails and imaginative threats. After I rubbed some salt in his wounds, we began imagining what it would take to continue providing what we'd intended all along to those who put their faith in us. After some wrangling, we’ve found a way to make it work.

I’d like to announce that on November 1st, 2012, TextDrive will relaunch anew as a separate hosting company, staffed and funded, run by me. Please consider the recently announced end-of-life for Joyent’s shared hosting customers now revised to be a continuation-of-life, to be carried out in the same friendly, creative, publishing-centered spirit of TextDrive’s early days.

No matter its humble beginnings, Joyent now operates in a very big arena, producing heavy artillery for the armies of cloud computing, and it's been years since the company has been structured to service the retail hosting customer. Moreover, the servers on which your accounts still reside are old, slow, inefficient, and they go down on occasion. Everyone deserves better.

Current shared hosting customers can expect to have at least double the resources provisioned have now, running on vastly more stable and efficient infrastructure. Running, in fact, on the very heavy artillery mentioned above.

I intend to have all current paying and lifetime shared hosting customers moved from our old data centers to new, modern and efficient infrastructure by November 1. We'll be doing all we can to automate the migration process and keep discomfort at bay. More communications and instructions on the migration process will follow. For now, know that Joyent shared hosting customers, whether paid or lifetime, are now TextDrive customers and that service will not be interrupted.

For updates and resources click here [the page linked by the OP].

It gives me great pleasure to indicate that I’ll talk to you soon.

Dean Allen

TextDrive

Edit: Here's the previous HN thread discussing this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4391669

I wish I had received this email, I think I missed out on one of the migrations at some point and I dropped off the list, but I re-added myself now.

It really makes me feel happy to see Dean to come out of the woodwork and handle this. I'm sure there's a million things he'd rather do than be involved in web hosting anymore, but he obviously felt some obligation to all of us who believed in his vision 8 years ago, and that more than makes up for a thousand what'd-you-expect-from-shared-hosting-you-idiot comments on HN and elsewhere.

I choose to give them the benefit of the doubt. Both TextDrive and Joyent Cloud have been highly productive enterprises. I hated to see TextDrive fall by the wayside but I still trust them more than a run-of-the-mill exit-seeking startup. I hope the new TextDrive makes money and is around for a long time.

What was it used to do? Can somebody tell, please?

I believe the issue at hand was that TextDrive sold "lifetime" hosting packages, was then subsumed by Joyent, who then (about a decade later) reneged on the lifetime hosting packages, scheduling them for cancellation later this year.

The lifetime package subscribers (and the community at large) were up in arms about it. Here's the earlier YC thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4391669

IIRC it was originally a shared web host. I think they also had a gimmicky lifetime subscription if you pre-paid for a year's worth of service.

The lifetime subscription was designed to fund TextDrive as a nascent company.

http://photodude.com/2004/06/01/textdrive-or-how-to-raise-40...

Thank you for posting that link, it adds a lot more depth to this story -- Anyone not familiar with the TextDrive lifetime subscription needs to read this.

Google's really good for those sorts of questions. But yes, they were a shared hosting provider that was one of the early leaders in supporting Rails application deployment.

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