MyRedis acquired by Garantia Data, gives customers 3 days to move off | Hacker News Reader

MyRedis acquired by Garantia Data, gives customers 3 days to move off

myredis.com

89 pointsm0th8766 comments

Some companies just don't understand how to write acquisition/winding down letters.

"We're excited" should almost never be used in an acquisition post unless the users also have something genuinely to be excited about. ie. Cookies, Balloons and otherwise exciting things!

Instead, what they wrote is:

> We're excited to be acquired, thanks for making this possible, now GTFO our servers in the next three days.

(Also on another note, couldn't you replicate their entire business in a weekend using Docker, vanilla Redis, and the boto python API?)

--------

Edit: (Since this is the top comment, I'll paste the comment from the founder who is hellbanned).

--------

    Hey, I'm Miles Smith, the Founder of MyRedis. I sent the email this morning
    and didn't read it through the eyes of my customers. I take ownership of
    that. We have updated our website, and sent a followup email to all 
    customers, to clarify the availability of customer data.

    All customer instances and data will be fully online and operational until at 
    least July 30th.
    Furthermore, I will be storing an archive of all customer data for 
    an additional 90 days,
    just in case someone missed something.
    I will be available to help all customers who would like assistance in migrating.

    Miles Smith Founder, MyRedis

-----

(Miles you are hellbanned. No one can see your comments from your current account)

the team page on the website changed in the last few days to remove the other owner it looks like abandonment of the company so they probably dont care about what people think

Jacob Jervey, the guy who was listed as co-founder and lead engineer of MyRedis until yesterday, was arrested for sexual assult. Maybe this had something to do with it?

http://vpsboard.com/topic/679-jacob-kiefus-jwj-jacob-jervey-...

This is not accurate. Jacob was let go several weeks ago. The website was changed the day of his termination to reflect this.

Also, you created an account just to throw this in?

>Also, you created an account just to throw this in?

I hate when people do this. I think hacker news accounts should be read-only for the first week.

Reply from miles:

  Actually, it's been a struggle for me. I've gone through two co-founders,
  who, in their own ways, just didn't work out. Who knows, maybe it's me. 
  All I DO know is that my customers were starting to be affected by it, 
  so I had to do something.
  The entire reason for this acquisition was for the customers. 
  They need someone who can take care of them like they deserve.

If the acquisition is for the customers the correct way to do this would be to handle the transfer for the users. Move the data for them and even keep the existing connection hostnames etc working. So, no change would have been needed for the users.

If the parent company has the same service why ask the users to do switch manually? I think with the excitement of the acquisition they have simple not thought through things.

I agree completely! However, in our particular instance, our customers are mostly developers themselves. Most developers are fully capable (and even prefer) to manage migrations themselves. Due to some features (pub/sub) that don't translate well with migrations on Redis, we wanted people to have the option. Which is why we are also migrating anyone who asks.

> The entire reason for this acquisition was for the customers.

That's just obviously not true.

How does this acquisition in any way help customers?

The resolution offered is to migrate manually to Redis Cloud, something customers could do regardless.

Seems the acquisition resulted in the service being shut down far more abruptly than otherwise, unless the situation was so bad they couldn't afford a few more weeks of hosting.

I posted a more in depth response in this thread, but the short of it is this.

1. I'd tried finding new people to help with the increased workload of new customers. Everyone I found failed, causing me months of setbacks while I did 2x the workload, and then tried to train a new person on the stack.

2. I've been funding this completely out of my own pocket. No VC money, or even buddy money. After the most recent co-founder being arrested, I had to make a decision. Either my customers suffer, or my family suffers. Since I was unwilling to have either of those out comes, the only logical (yet painful) solution was to have a company with the proper resources and expertise take over.

While I was initially disappointed in what seemed like irresponsible post-acquisition behavior after reading the linkbait title, after knowing what kind of a situation you were in, it makes a ton of sense. Don't worry about the ridiculous critics in the crowd, it's a very different world when you're in the thick of a failing startup with people/family depending on you.

This seems like the most responsible action you could have taken, and is a noble way of handling your customers' trust. The option to migrate anyone who asks but to encourage developers who know what they're doing to do it themselves is similarly appropriate.

The only seemingly missing piece is a longer notification window.

Sorry for the rough ride of a failing company, but well done for handling the transition appropriately.

The really crappy part was, the traction was starting to pick up this last month. :(

Ok - I guess it was just REALLY inept messaging after the acquisition, maybe mostly acquiring company's fault.

How about:

We've been acquired. Over the next 3 months we will be migrating customers and will notify you of any action required.

Instead of:

We've been acquired. Piss off.

So they are aquiring a company composed of: 1) brand goodwill 2) customers 3) technology 4) employees

Apparently the first two were not worth much and it was even more valuable to create significant negative reputation for Redis Cloud by damaging both. The third is clearly not useful since Redis Cloud is already the "most advanced." Employees, well, they better have a good pay package to stick around after that demoralizing hit.

We can safely put Garantia in the category of "couldn't care less about customers."

Maybe it was just an acquihire? Must have been if they care this little about their product/customers...

Perhaps, but why shutdown the service so abruptly?

Why not shut down the service in, say, 3 months, support MyRedis customers to migrate to Redis Cloud (or elsewhere) before moving the MyRedis personnel into their new roles.

As somebody without any experience in the world of start-ups the only explanation I can come up is that MyRedis was haemoraging cash so badly that this wasn't feasible however if that is the case why would you want to hire the team?

Can anybody with experience of such dealings shed some light?

Giving only three days and offering to assist with transfers could also point to the possibility that they really don't have that many paying customers to begin with.

The employees can see how the customers are being treated. I expect most of them will be moving on, negating the acquihire.

My assumption is this is a buy and destroy a competitor move. Would almost make sense, except that the splash page publicaly announced who the purchasing company is.

They could also be buying the assets(servers).

The site was updated to a somewhat better 2.5 weeks to shutdown. It now says "Not quite sure what we were thinking on that one!"

How could a founder not think about what will happen to customers if they shut their servers down with three days notice? Seems like more than just not "thinking." Defies my attempts at understanding.

Anyhow, hopefully no one is taken down too hard by this.

I'm not quite sure why I was hellbanned. I guess that's the point of it though.

I want to apologize to everyone who was affected by this. MyRedis was my first SaaS, and it was a learning experience in many ways (and continues to be, apparently).

I have adjusted the shutdown dates to give everyone more time.

On a personal note, here's a brief backstory to explain how I got here:

I started MyRedis as a technical co-founder almost a year ago. Since then, two other people have filled the other co-founder role. One decided to move to NZ one day without notifying me, and start working for some "dream job" company. The other, as has already been pointed out in this thread, was arrested recently.

MyRedis was starting to grow at a rate that I no longer felt comfortable saying I could manage. I was starting to fall behind in basic admin stuff, and it wasn't fair to my customers. This was the entire reason I finally decided to find someone who could take care of the MyRedis customers, and hence, where we are today.

I've spent nearly $50,000.00 of my own savings to build MyRedis, and support my family while doing so. I've learned a ton, and I'm going to pick myself up and do it again, someday.

I hope this transparency sheds some light on MyRedis. It wasn't some big company, it was me. I woke up every day and personally answered tickets, wrote code, and lived and breathed MyRedis. In the end, though. It's the customers who matter.

Miles, If you want to apply what you learned hosting other NoSQL databases in the cloud, please contact me HN AT nosql dot com.

Sent you an email.

It appears that the owner has responded several times in this thread but is hellbanned.

For those that don't have show dead on: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=wedtm

EDIT: Apparently you still need to enable show dead to see his recent comments even when using the above link.

this. good edit. was just going to post to say this.

The thread that initiated the hellban seems to have been plucked right out of Reddit. A case study of how not to behave on HN.

This is a great illustration of why I'd never use a startup to host my database.

Filing this under: "how not to announce an acquisition"

Also filing Garantia Data under "companies I will never work with."

I was evaluating Redis Cloud at work, but this gives me real pause. This reflects very poorly on Garantia Data.

Any suggestions for other hosted Redis services people like?

If you want no frills, low cost, you can fire up a Dotcloud Redis instance pretty easily.

If you really want low cost and no frills, just run redis locally.

I still don't understand the point of third party redis - I'm not aware of a service that is more lightweight and CPU friendly than redis.

I work for RedisGreen - a different take as we do dedicated servers and focus on analytics/monitoring. Feel free to ping me with any questions. bpo at stovepipestudios.com

We understand how you got this impression. We do hope that after the dust had settled it is clear that the decision to shut down myredis.com was not ours to begin with. Aside from obvious reason of growing our business, the acquisition was partly put in place to provide a community of existing Redis user with a reliable and proven solution that they can start using immediately. Do note that we offer a 30-days money-back guarantee existing myredis.com customers if they try our service and are unhappy with it for any reason. Those who aren't myredis.com users and wish to test/use our offer are more than welcome to sign up for any of our services including, of course, the Free plan.

If you'd like to open a direct channel to us and discuss this (or any other matter for that matter), please drop us a line at info@garantiadata.com

Their update that data might be kept around until the 30th, but they won't have support after Friday is almost an insult to injury here. I don't understand why they wouldn't just continue to support MyRedis for some reasonable amount of time. So not worth it.

Never understood why would someone like to use hosted Redis solutions from redis-cloud, redistogo etc... Their Customers are developers.. why cant developers spawn an instance with Redis on it and use it themselves.. how does this hosted redis business model work..?

I have modest needs from Redis -- basically I want a queue ~1000 items long, under 1MB per item.

I could provision a couple of EC2 servers, get Redis going on them, set up some sort of monitoring, some failover mechanism, etc. $X/month.

Or I could pay someone $Y/month to give me a Redis server I can use, and not have to care about the rest, so I can spend time worrying about things more relevant to my actual goals.

If $Y is not much more than $X, it's a very easy decision.

If you have modest needs of it, just run it on the same machine.

The whole point of redis is low latency data queries, which running on some third-party service you lose.

That might be a point of Redis, but it's certainly not the whole point, as I don't care about it but Redis is still useful to me.

And again, just because I can do it myself doesn't mean I should. I came into adulthood as a sysadmin. I can take a project from bolting racks into the floor to writing front-end code, but I don't. There are better ways.

> just run it on the same machine

Sometimes you don't have that option (e.g. Heroku).

You just answered your own question. Their customers are developers, i.e., a scarce and expensive resource who's time is most effectively spent developing rather than configuring, tuning, monitoring and otherwise maintaining server parks, virtual or not.

But redis doesn't really require any of that - it'll run and provide decent performance on a small instance, or even better, running on the same instance your app is running.

"yum -y install redis" then "service redis start" and it just works. I'm not sure there is an easier service to use than local redis.

Interesting concept, but how does that scale?

Scale? I thought the use case was modest load?

Either way, I do 30K/sec queries on a single redis instance on a small instance - the performance is quite exceptional.

Fair enough. 30k/sec sounds pretty nice. Sadly, I imagine that's a local instance. We need a solution that can handle orders of magnitude more than that though. Which, from my understanding, means multiple instances. And I have no experience with scaling Redis. I'd kill for a good turn-key solution.

Edit: Someone contact me. I want to give you money!

I have no personal experience using redis-cloud, but their website[1] does give a good overview of their features. Currently, redis has no native clustering/sharding support AFAIK, but cloud based services like redis-cloud seem to be offering exactly that, in a very transparent way. It also seems to be taking care of monitoring, backups etc.

[1] - http://redis-cloud.com/redis/redis-comparison

As a representative from one of the competitors mentioned there, I can tell you that feature list is dishonest and absurd.

When someone offers you "infinite scale", run.

Hi there,

I'd love to help you. We (RedisGreen) run extremely high-performance, dedicated Redis installations and work directly with customers to help tune their app and their installation for the best possible service.

Getting Redis up and running is easy, as has been mentioned in this thread. But the devil is in the details. Third-party vendors distinguish themselves in terms of active monitoring, quality/knowledge of support, and closed-source features (e.g. one company offers what they call "multicore Redis").

I've been running large-scale production instances of Redis since 2009, and our other team members are similarly qualified.

I'd love to help you out and give you honest recommendations on system scaling. bpo at stovepipestudios.com

Actually, I have several TBs of redis capacity online and run millions of queries a second against it. I was speaking to a simple use case.

A bit of googling will answer most of your redis scaling questions.

Not much notice considering how likely it is for people to be on holiday this week (taking advantage of the long weekend).

Classy move - especially w.r.t it being a long weekend in the US.

The long weekend in the US was last weekend, before this announcement. I don't see what that has to do with anything.

Every company i've ever worked is usually "extra busy" after a long weekend because they're catching up with email/calls/etc that have gathered during it (and also support issues, etc.)

Coming into work right after a few days off and having this thrown on your plate with no notice just adds to this. (But ultimately, it's really about the complete lack of notice more than anything else.)

This story repeats with most such startups: - indextank - was a great cloud full text indexing service, acquired by linkedin - mailgun - acquired by rackspace - still functioning but they stopped expanding into interesting directions and are winding down some of their more advanced APIs

So bottom line is, if you want to be sure about your data, set it up on your servers instead of some hot cloud providing startup..

You can reduce this argument all the way to writing your own OS and building your own hardware. And no, that is not ad absurdum, there are valid real world business cases for both.

It all depends an a simple cost/benefit calculation. There's no absolute right or wrong choice.

Also, not having the knowledge to do something is a way bigger vulnerability than outsourcing the execution.

My preferred approach is to figure out how to do it ourselves, immediately followed by finding a 3rd party to outsource it to once we know exactly what we need so we can focus on other things. And of course always make sure we are able to take it back.

Well, I can see it coming... A tumblr to call all startups that are acqui-hired and betraying their customers with such short notices.

http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

We totally agree and our customers ALWAYS come first.

Regrettably this entire discussion, while valid in other contexts, is the result of human error. myredis.com will continue to be fully operational until the end of the month. At that date it will discontinue its operations due to reasons that are beyond our control.

We invite every myredis.com user to give our Redis Cloud service a try and decide for herself/himself whether we live up to their expectations. Furthermore, all paying myredis.com who will choose a comparable subscription from our service for their business, will be given a 30-day full money-back guarantee so they'll be truly free to make their own choices without risk.

Can they really do this? They haven't obligations for their customers? It is strange on a justice point of view. It is not because they acquired it than they have all rights such as break any current contracts.

I'm not sure that I see the big deal here--the message seems to be "Hey, we're going to be turning off these features, and migrating user data over here as needed. Here's where to file support tickets, here's the timetable for service deprecation, and here's what may or may not be under our old SLA."

Though it is somewhat annoying, it's hardly a slap in the face for people.

When that timetable is 72 hours long, it's a slap in the face.

We'd be talking about this a lot differently if MyRedis' sunset were six months out.

Every time something like this happens the rest of us have it just that much harder.

Note to self: never use Redis Cloud or any service offered by Garantia (oh, the irony of that name...).

This is not hypothetical, I'm seriously considering using a Redis cloud service instead of running our own.

I'm actually in the market for a similar service. We need simple/turn-key Redis clustering. Twemproxy lacks the features we need and I don't have the time to find alternatives.

-Sysadmin

Edit: Someone contact me. I want to give you money!

We entirely sympathize with your sentiments given the inflammatory nature of this discussion. We hope that the clarifications provided helped you to change back your mind. If, however, you are still doubtful of our standing commitment to our customers and the entire Redis community, please contact us at info@garantiadata.com so we can have a real dialog regarding your concerns.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com