Comment by tijs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tijs | Hacker News Reader

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?

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