holgate

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.

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.

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.

That's the boilerplate that the support desk is sending out to everyone.

I suppose the question to ask is this: "Were you lying back in 2006 when you said the offer was good '[a]s long as we exist', or are you lying now? Or did you decide to renege on your promise somewhere in-between?"

You'll get the same boilerplate response, but it'll be on record.

Well, thanks for all your recent wisdom. Now all you need to do is travel back in time to 2004 and warn everyone that backing Dean Allen's little cottage-industry hosting venture will end in tears.

There were actually a number of "VC" phases with TextDrive, starting with the "VC200" in 2004 that raised $40,000 from 200 pledges of $200 to acquire and set up the hardware--

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

That was followed by a number of upgrade offerings ("Mixed Grill", "3 Martini Lunch") in subsequent years, extending into the Joyent merger/acquisition, that required a larger lump-sum payment.

Their pitch on lifetime service? "How long is it good for? As long as we exist."

http://web.archive.org/web/20060202181857/http://textdrive.c...

Now, you can argue in strictly financial terms that those initial customers (of whom I'm one) have probably got their money's worth, and that the hosting landscape has changed sufficiently that the lifetime products are peripheral to Joyent's main business. The counterargument is that Joyent not only acquired TextDrive's customers, but the goodwill surrounding Dean Allen's original venture, and has traded on that goodwill ever since. Clearly, they feel that's not worth much these days.

Furthermore, giving people who've had eight years of not having to think about hosting options just 80 days to migrate, with explicit notice that their servers will be shut down and wiped on October 31, strikes me as pretty cheap.