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.

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.