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Joyent ending "lifetime" hosting accounts
- pmb 14y agoI paid the extra $$ for lifetime (and did it back when I was a grad student and had basically zero money) because I didn't want to have to think about hosting any more. Now I have to think about hosting again. Ugh. Broken promises leave a bad taste in my mouth.
- pmb 14y agoOn a related note: where is good for hosting two small websites? I'd like to be able to log in with SSH and get an actual Unix shell (and not have to pay too much, as the websites are neither large nor popular).
- eropple 14y agoIf all you need is a shell plus LAMP, Dreamhost is pretty decent shared hosting. (Their Rails support apparently works, but Rails-using customers seem to have a tendency to suck up a lot of resources that other people could be using more moderately.)
- slig 14y agoI've been very happy with WebFaction for a couple of small websites.
- debacle 14y agoMediaLayer is good, but I've never seen a reason not to shell out the extra $10 a month for a VPS.
- evanwalsh 14y agoIf you're comfortable getting dirty, I'd check out http://prgmr.com/xen/ http://prgmr.com/xen/
- pmb 14y agoThanks! This looks ideal for my needs!
- wensheng 14y agoI have a small one from them as a NS server and has no issue at all. However their bandwidth allocation (40G for 256m plan) is not enough for pretty much anything else.
- dholowiski 14y agoI have two small servers from them. Highly recommended (if you don't mind getting your hands dirty).
- thirdhaf 14y agoAs long as it's not terribly mission critical I'd suggest a VPS. Since you have a virtualized server you get everything you mentioned (and the responsibility of keeping the damn thin up to date). Take a look at http://lowendbox.com http://lowendbox.com You're likely to find deals in the $20/yr range for small instances with ~128MB RAM. Expect 99% uptime and you'll be pleasantly surprised with the third nine.
- minsight 14y agoThe deals on lowendbox are a bit too low end. The providers often disappear after a few months.
- Isofarro 14y agoIf you chose a supplier at random, they yes, some of those will probably disappear after a few months. But if you spend some time digging around a little, you'll find things like "Best Provider of the Year" type posts (e.g. http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/best-low-end-providers-in-2011-q2-its-ram-host-quickweb-and-buyvm-again/ http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/best-low-end-providers-in-2011... ). These tend not to be fly by nighters. Consider starting with that list, and look for recent offers by them. Also read the comments on each offer looking for irregularities. Lowendbox has a decent community, they know when an offer smells, or when a fly-by-nighter drops in. Granted it won't be perfect, but you can reduce the risk of a provider disappearing all of a sudden with a little bit of reading and digging. Two in particular I find trustworthy: VooServers and Evorack But beware, many low-end-box type providers use stock standard off-the-shelf tools and software, including WHM. So if you have a religious disagreement with passwords in cleartext emails, you should steer well clear of lowendbox/WHM combinations and go for a highend supplier instead. Or perhaps a more practical method, don't use a secure password when you sign up, and make it more secure on the VM itself when you log in for the first time YMMV.
- subsection1h 14y agoIn addition to the post you linked to, here are two additional lists of popular low end VPS providers that were posted at LowEndBox: http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/top-providers-2011q1/ http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/top-providers-2011q1/ http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/top-low-end-vps-providers-2012-q2/ http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/top-low-end-vps-providers-2012... Here's a list of popular low end VPS providers at the LowEndTalk Wiki that is based on the same data used for the above lists: http://www.lowendtalk.com/wiki/top-providers http://www.lowendtalk.com/wiki/top-providers Here are the popular low end VPS providers I made note of when I researched this subject recently: http://buyvm.net/ http://buyvm.net/ (limited availability; see http://doesbuyvmhavestock.com/ http://doesbuyvmhavestock.com/) https://hostigation.com/ https://hostigation.com/ http://www.ramhost.us/ http://www.ramhost.us/ (owns http://tinyvz.com/ http://tinyvz.com/ and http://tinykvm.com/ http://tinykvm.com/) http://www.securedragon.net/ http://www.securedragon.net/ In addition to LowEndBox and LowEndTalk, the following two sites had some good info about low end VPSs: http://www.vpsadvice.com/ http://www.vpsadvice.com/ http://freevps.us/ http://freevps.us/ I didn't end up playing with any low end VPSs because none of the providers I evaluated offer users the ability to clone VPSs, which is one of my requirements.
- marquis 14y agoHappy with http://vpslink.com http://vpslink.com (XEN) for small services, and Linode for bigger things.
- mileswu 14y agoAmazon EC2 on the micro plan maybe? It's free for the first year as a trial.
- MikeKusold 14y agoDoes that plan require the cluster to spin up if you haven't had a visitor in a while? That's the reason I don't use Heroku for my personal site.
- gtirloni 14y agoI bought a 3-year micro instance for my personal needs and it's been pretty good.
- RyanMcGreal 14y agoI highly recommend Webfaction: http://www.webfaction.com?affiliate=hammertime http://www.webfaction.com?affiliate=hammertime Yes, I just shamelessly put in an affiliate link, but the service really is very good. It's shared hosting but you get SSH, a smart admin panel and very reasonable prices for your memory. After a few years using it, I'm also happy to report that their technical support is excellent - timely, helpful and knowledgeable.
- PuercoPop 14y agoWhat I disliked about webfaction is that the connection is proxied behind an nginx. But it is true that they have an excellent support. They answer almost inmediately. Also their Q&A was migrated to a stackexchange clone. I prefer Linode, a little more expensive but you get decide even your own distro. (Yay for Archlinux)
- ddorian43 14y agoI have had the same experience.
- petermonsson 14y agoThanks for pointing out WebFaction. Of all the mentioned solutions WebFaction seems to me to be the closest thing to the old TextDrive shared hosting. I'm getting too old to want to get my hands dirty with managing my own VPS for a few simple PHP sites, some email accounts and my subversion repositories (and I can even switch to git).
- otaku888 14y agoWebfaction is also good if you want to run a no hassle Django installation. I initially got an account when I was learning Django and there weren't many Django friendly shared hosts out there. I have kept it to this day as their hosting panel is still pretty useful. They also have a bunch of automatic installs for rails, cherrypy, pylons, pyramid, subversion and trac etc. I've since moved on to do it myself on VPS but I still think Webfaction offers something different with their "framework" application approach.
- jdlshore 14y agonearlyfreespeech.net is perfect for this sort of thing.
- icebraining 14y agoNearlyFreeSpeech is very cheap and they even give you a shell with gcc (and I've run uploaded and run Go apps). They do require the applications to be static or CGI, though.
- resplin 14y agoI really like working with Bluehost (http://www.bluehost.com/ http://www.bluehost.com/). They are amazingly cheap shared hosting plans targeted at non-administrators, but if you are willing to provide a copy of your government ID (as insurance against naughtiness) they will provide shell access. Their admins are very accommodating about letting me run my own stuff as long as it won't impact other users of the server.
- jkubicek 14y agoSeconded. I've been using blue host for years with no troubles. Only downside is they keep lowering their rates, so I've got to call them every year or so to switch to the cheaper plan.
- freehunter 14y agoI host three sites on Linode, lowest plan at $20/mo. They're excellent, as just about everyone can tell you. It's a full install of a Linux distro of your choosing, any software you want. It's as good as having a Linux machine sitting in your office. However, $20/mo might not be the lowest price you can find for two low-traffic sites. edit - I should point out, I host three low traffic sites on one low-end Linode instance, so that' $20/mo flat for three sites. I also use it for compiling code (I can compile code anywhere from my phone!) and testing out new features for various bits of software, so it has more use than just hosting.
- teach 14y agoI use Linode for several low-traffic sites as well, and I'd recommend them. However, there's one crucial aspect in which they're different than having a Linux machine sitting in your office (which I also have): for $100 I can put a 2TB drive in the local server. The equivalent space at Linode would cost $1000 a year.
- eli 14y agoIf you have lots of data, Linode probably isn't a good fit. I'd look into Amazon S3 (which I suppose you could use with Linode hosting in front of it, but I'd probably just use AWS if I were relying heavily on S3).
- freehunter 14y agoDespite my post, I'm more into server administration than I am programming. Might be why I love Linode. I've helped a couple people set up their Linode sites, and tie it into S3 (and other services) for various uses. The thing I love most about Linode is that it's anything you want it to be.
- wensheng 14y agoFor VPS, I recommend burst.net, specifically their XEN 1Gb ram plan. Their price structure is kinda strange, 0.5G is $7.95, 1G is $12.95, 1.5G is 24.95. So 1G plan is a no brainer. I have 2 of these, one in their PA Datacenter, the other in CA. http://www.burst.net/xenvps.shtml http://www.burst.net/xenvps.shtml
- DASD 14y agoYou might be interested in prgmr.com . VPS based on Xen. The owner is also a member of HN and wrote "The Book of Xen" a couple of years ago. Also since you mentioned UNIX, maybe arpnetworks.com . As I recall they run Linux KVM VPS but offer OpenBSD and FreeBSD if preferred over a Linux guest.
- admax88q 14y agoI don't think OpenBSD runs on Xen as a guest yet. They do offer NetBSD, not sure about FreeBSD
- berodam 14y agoI'm really happy with asmallorange the service is cheap and customer support is great
- cpher 14y agoJust to chime in with everyone else...I'm in the same boat. VC2/3 since Sept/2005. I started with them because they were the only host to offer Rails support. Now, my most pressing need is email support--transferring the main accounts, so that gmail can POP them off the accounts. Edit: Obviously, any serious application would have been migrated off of Joyent long ago, but many of us have several small apps (Rails, Wordpress, etc) along with email accounts. I think it's more of an issue of migrating many small apps rather than a single large app. I've used Slicehost (now Rackspace) successfully for a couple of years, but my pricing is probably terrible now. 256MB slice for $20/mth. I have a feeling I need to re-visit this...
- mipapage 14y agoFunny, we got in on VCII I think and had to think about hosting all the time. Our server never performed well. I think we had one site on Textdrive that was live, and quite quickly moved to another host for obvious reasons. I'm glad it worked fro some people, overall a poor experience for us.
- pmb 14y agoI never asked much of it - all I really cared was that it was hosting that I didn't have to think about. Two WordPress sites, some backups of important files and the occasional scp around a stupid firewall or NAT box. And now they are canceling the lifetime service, or, put their ham-handed way: "your lifetime service will end on October 31, 2012." Seriously. Someone in charge of PR actually wrote down and sent out an email with the sentence "your lifetime service will end on October 31, 2012."
- smacktoward 14y agoMaybe they know something you don't know? Like perhaps they're planning on murdering you on October 30th. In that scenario, the sentence would make total sense.
- brokentone 14y agoIs this a promise, or a contract? It seems that if they want to renege on a contract that they ought to refund the entire amount.
- colinshark 14y agoIt's pretty easy for a promise + money exchanged to become a contract.
- pmb 14y agoWe had all of: offer, acceptance, consideration, meeting of the minds, capacity, and legality. It sure felt like a contract to me.
- weel 14y agoYup. Now as for damages, though, even though indeed they are supposed to cover your lost value and not the original price, the original price is going to set a point of reference that will influence how much you could reasonably convince any judge your lost value is. But say we compute it another way. Suppose you can buy equivalent service from Amazon for $100 a year forever. The net present value of that perpetuity at a 10% interest rate is $1000. You can easily see why if you imagine investing the $1000 at the 10% interest rate and using the interest each year to buy hosting: your principal would stay at $1000 forever. Now plug in numbers you actually think are feasible. And subtract attorney's fees. Good luck.
- bradleyjg 14y agoContract damages aren't the price paid, they are the value received had the contract been honored. In this case that's probably considerably more.
- jacques_chester 14y agoThe customers don't want a refund (damages). They want "specific performance" -- ie that Joyent uphold their end of the bargain: lifetime service. (IANAL, TINLA).
- joevandyk 14y agoI believe I also have a "lifetime" account, I have not received this email. Though I did switch over to the solaris machines a few years ago.
- OliverM 14y agoI thought I'd switched over to Solaris hosting, but still got the email??
- zdw 14y agoI really like what Joyent is doing with illumos, dtrace, and other similar projects. That said... They basically have let their "legacy" customers languish for a while, and after a pretty bad migration process a year or two ago, it was obvious that they really wanted to discard these old accounts - those boxes are running a version of opensolaris that's over 4 years old (snv_67). Most of us paid quite a bit for our "lifetime" subscriptions, just to have it ripped up into a bunch of different parts that either get EOL'ed or sold off to another company (as was done with Strongspace).
- hemancuso 14y agoWe're still developing Strongspace, and the lifetime subscribers are still being provided for by Joyent.
- zdw 14y agoI'm not faulting Expandrive by any means - you guys are great. Any intention to EOL the "lifetime" plans on your end?
- hemancuso 14y agoNope. Joyent is working with us to move the lifetime customers to some newer infrastructure, but they will be taken care of. Lifetime is a somewhat better story for storage, as you can consolidate 8U of power-hungry X4500 thumpers using 500GB disks down to a couple U of modern machines with 12x3TB arrays and a lot of RAM.
- nriley 14y agoMy account's server runs snv_121, so more like 3 years old, but still ancient. There was an attempt to upgrade us in December/January which was partially completed and finally "put on hold indefinitely". http://wiki.joyent.com/display/shared/Shared+Hosting+Maintenance+Schedules http://wiki.joyent.com/display/shared/Shared+Hosting+Mainten...
- gexla 14y agoMixed Griller here. I don't remember what the language was, but perhaps in this case "lifetime" meant the lifetime of the product, shared hosting. Personally, I'm happy with the accelerator, I never did like shared hosting and quit using it a long time ago except for a couple of sites that are gathering dust.
- ceejayoz 14y agohttp://web.archive.org/web/20060203030930/http://www.textdrive.com/mixedgrill http://web.archive.org/web/20060203030930/http://www.textdri... Q: How long is it good for? A: As long as we exist.
- stock_toaster 14y agoDidn't they cease to exist when they were acquired?
- blndcat 14y agosee footer of the page. They (TextDrive) were already acquired at the time of the offer.
- stock_toaster 14y agoAha. That would indeed make a difference. ;) Thanks.
- justin66 14y agoIt doesn't, really. Being acquired wouldn't ordinarily relieve them of a contractual obligation. (Bankruptcy would.)
- tait 14y agoGexla, I'm on an accelerator. They are going away too.
- quangv 14y agoI think lifetime should mean lifetime. They should of given you at least 15 years free I think.
- masterzora 14y agoIt appears that lifetime means lifetime of the product rather than lifetime of the customer. Is anyone really that surprised?
- endersshadow 14y agoThis is pretty common with consumer products. If something has a "lifetime warranty," that "lifetime" is typically a defined period of time (e.g.-seven years), not until you die.
- ceejayoz 14y agoJoyent specified the length of "lifetime" as "as long as we exist" in the offer.
- rhizome 14y agoYes, apparently so.
- ceejayoz 14y agoThe folks who read the offer are probably surprised. http://web.archive.org/web/20060203030930/http://www.textdrive.com/mixedgrill http://web.archive.org/web/20060203030930/http://www.textdri... Q: How long is it good for? A: As long as we exist.
- jessriedel 14y agoAccording to michaelhoffman, the FAQ said this: "Q: How long is it good for? A: As long as we exist." Seems pretty clear cut to me. (Not sure this is accurate, though. I did find it repeated in a forum discussing Joyent in 2006.)
- 14y ago
- patio11 14y agoFor folks who are headscratching here, back in about 2007 (I remember it because I was getting into Rails) Joyent's precursor company TextDrive bootstrapped some hardware purchases by selling a (barely capable of running Rails, fairly rare for the time) shared hosting account. The kicker was that you'd pay about ~18 months upfront and it would be Lifetime. I don't trust my memory for numbers but somewhere between $150 and $300 if I recall correctly. I actually used them as a hosting provider for a while, and followed the support forums. Supporting the Lifetime offering was a challenge pretty much from the getgo, because some folks were less than neighborly with their usage of system resources, partially out of ignorance, partially out of Rails playing very poorly with shared systems, and partially because you attract an interesting type of customer with this offering. The physical hardware had some faults and probably has not improved much over time. Meanwhile, shared hosting for Rails is, well, not a very attractive option over the last couple of years, thanks to VPSes, Heroku, Amazon, etc etc. Joyent apparently wants to exit the business. Of note: I remember somebody asking Slicehost to match the business model and Matt shot them down saying that it was too gimmicky for his taste and wouldn't be mutually beneficial. Slicehost eventually came up with a neat solution towards the same end: they were oversubscribed, so they sorted their waiting list by the amount of non-refundable deposit you were willing to make, giving them much-needed cash flow without committing them to service for forever.
- zdw 14y agoThe prices were considerably higher than you mention - $500 or $1000 - here's a post about moving between "lifetime" plans from 2007: http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?id=13148 http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?id=13148
- tomjen3 14y agoClass action law suit?
- slig 14y agoGreat, one company less to worry about next time I'm shopping for hosting.
- gaoshan 14y agoSeriously. We are looking at hosting right now and are considering Rackspace and Joyent. In fact, I am one of the lifetime hosting people screwed over by this move, but this makes it an easy call. No way we are trusting Joyent with anything.
- troels 14y agoRackspace are amazing. The only gripe I have (which isn't minor, I might add) is that you can only buy machines in tiers. If you want a machine with high network throughput (say, like a proxy), you need to purchase lots of cpu, ram and disk space that you have no need for.
- nthj 14y agoYes, I really like Rackspace. Great customer service! And the tier setup makes sense to me. It's Smith's Division of Labor principle at play. Sure, it's technically possible to adjust each feature separately, but you add so much complexity at every layer that it's a wash economically. In the same vein, I can buy a Honda Civic for $10K, but a car with custom specs isn't $12K, it's $some_orders_of_magnitude_more, even if it's equivalent to a Civic in almost every way.
- troels 14y agoI fully agree with that. It's just something to keep in mind before building on their platform. It's not for me to decide how Rackspace should run their business, but for me it simply means I can't use them even though I want to. If only they kept a few "asymmetric" configurations as options, like Amazon does. But, alas.
- michaelbuckbee 14y agoThis actually seems fairly typical for most free or lifetime plans for things. Are there counterexamples of site/services that offered lifetime access that are still doing so 5 years later?
- mikeash 14y agoAmerican Airlines started selling a lifetime pass in 1981, and is still honoring them today, although they're starting to crack down on certain abuses of the system.
- MrMember 14y agoFor anyone interested, there was an interesting article on this subject published earlier this year. http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/05/business/la-fi-0506-golden-ticket-20120506 http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/05/business/la-fi-0506-...
- rmc 14y agoFacebook, Gmail, Twitter, Hotmail, etc.
- smackfu 14y agoTivo has Lifetime subscriptions, where the lifetime is of the hardware but they transfer if you sell the hardware. They aren't always selling them as an option, but they always honor them, and have been for 10+ years.
- blndcat 14y agoIn the end shared hosting with Joyent wasn't very good. It was slow, it was clunky and had an air of neglect. I have one site remaining on it I think. Most of my sites are on Linode. What was worse was that Joyent changed directions, decided its then current customers weren't profitable enough (my guess shared hosting = higher per head tech support costs) and basically stagnated the service while it introduced new services. I think they did this a couple of times, and it has always made me relunctant to recommend them to friends (even ones looking for cloud services). Sigh I hope StrongSpace will still honour the lifetime part. BTW for readers who think lifetime account holders are being greedy, the point of the accounts was that when TextDrive/Joyent needed extra capital to expand, they offered lifetime accounts in return for quite a bit of cash up front. In part, they are where they are due to this clever bit of fund raising.
- hemancuso 14y agoJoyent will keep supporting their Strongspace customers [which we, ExpanDrive, provide the service for - Joyent provides the hardware for their lifetimers]
- blndcat 14y agoThanks Jeff for clearing this up
- phearlez 14y agoI suspect this cuts right to the core of "why" Joyent would dump pretty low-overhead services and catch the flack over it. The hardware requirements to provide this shared hosting environment has plunged over the years; it's part of why I disagree with the "why did you EXPECT a lifetime deal" folks - because I always assumed that such a level of service would get cheaper and easier. Except the one thing that doesn't get cheaper is the human power needed to administer the stuff and deal with the people. And as Joyent moves away from that sort of thing it becomes an unusual task and a drain on core business. Which doesn't mean I think this is okay; the smart thing would have been to hand all of us lifetimers a lifetime bottom-tier slice. But I see why they'd want to be out of shared hosting.
- mikeash 14y agoI assume they're giving everybody a refund of their purchase price, right? ...Right?
- howeyc 14y agoThey should, but probably wont. If you sell a service, but decide not to provide it you should refund the money. Judging from the comments most of HN assumes if you "attempt" to provide the service you can keep the money. Yes, I get it's a losing proposition for Joyent to live up to their obligations. So what? You either live up to them, or refund the money, it's really that simple.
- mikeash 14y agoYeah, the comments seem to be filled with people saying that it's not practical to provide "lifetime", and people buying it should have known they didn't mean it anyway. I look at this the same way I look at "unlimited" internet service. Unlike a lot of the tech crowd, I have no problem whatsoever with metered bandwidth. My only quibble is that if you advertise "unlimited" you had better actually provide unlimited. If you want to charge for overages or enact caps, you don't get to call it "unlimited".
- ck2 14y agoEvery company that offers "lifetime" anything, seems to mean their lifetime, not yours. I once had a lifetime free checking account, I still have the advertising flyers from when I got it. Well they took that away from me last year too. I guess they just count on you getting a lawyer and lawsuit being more of a hassle than you just walking away.
- nemesisj 14y ago"your lifetime service will end on October 31, 2012" If you're writing that sentence and don't see a problem with it, there's no helping you. Look, many of us have been there and sold "free" things to early customers who become a pain later on, but you have to honor it. Better yet, never sell something "lifetime" without at least some kind of low recurring fee to cover nominal costs.
- keithpeter 14y agoThank you: just the idea of someone sitting down and typing that phrase in amazes me. Some kind of token refund and a slightly longer switch-over period could have turned this into a PR positive.
- typicalrunt 14y agoAs annoyed as I am with all of it, I'm more interested to know how to move off of their products and services now. My lifetime account is where I have several important email servers, and I don't know how to migrate them. All the email says is to contact Joyent about getting migrated to one of their other product offerings. However, if I am only given 2.5 months to sort all this stuff out, I DO NOT WANT to use Joyent services. I'd love to use GMail for Business, Linode or what have you, but I don't know where to start.
- tracker1 14y agoI tend to just use an IMAP mail client (like thunderbird) connect the old server, and new server, then copy from one to the other... this doesn't take care of multiple users and their accounts/passwords though.
- gaoshan 14y agoSet up an IMAP connection, copy everything over to your local machine, connect via IMAP to your new mail host and move everything over to it. I usually use Gmail for Business but be aware that this now has a 10 user limit on the free account.
- ubernostrum 14y agoWhen Connector shut down, I switched to Fastmail, which had a nice little "fill in the credentials and press the button" migration process. Been with 'em ever since.
- thelibrarian 14y agoI too switched to FastMail a year or so ago for my email, as I found Joyent email to be slow and didn't have any spam filtering functionality. They have an IMAP/POP email importer which will suck in all your email and folders from you previous provider. Worked like a charm.
- opendomain 14y agoI do not want to be a jerk here, but the only reason I joined was the promise of "lifetime" - they can NOT just cancel our accounts does it does not suit them. Please contact me webmaster @ opendomain ORG if you would like to join the class action lawsuit.
- jackolas 14y agobest of luck, if I was in the situation I'd definitely sue in small claims court.
- opendomain 14y agoWow! I have received over a dozen emails in the first hours that want to join in the lawsuit. We have enough to form an offical class and will be able to get Joyent to abide by the original terms. Please contact me soon if you want to participate!
- joshe 14y agoHad an account with them back around then because their site made them seem technically proficient, but dealing with their customer service was like dealing with bad sys admins - grudging help and lazy. There were also a lot of unfinished nooks and crannies in their system. An overall lack of craftsmanship and care. The email brought back not so fond memories and is indicative of their attitude in all their interactions. Partly you are paying for company culture and theirs is not good.
- michaelhoffman 14y agoI wonder why Joyent thinks they can get away with this. "Q: How long is it good for? A: As long as we exist." seems to be a pretty good definition of "lifetime." I would think they could only get out of their promise via bankruptcy. Maybe Joyent is trying to substitute for legal bankruptcy with moral bankruptcy.
- larrys 14y ago"I wonder why Joyent thinks they can get away with this" "As long as we exist" Possession is 9/10ths of the law. Nobody is going to file a private lawsuit to enforce this (assuming there is even a leg to stand on to enforce it I haven't read the exact contractual promise..) And the other option would be a class action lawsuit where there would have to be enough class members to interest an attorney. (Not relevant in this case but if a company was acquired the new company may have not acquired all the previous companies legal obligations but simply setup a new entity and assumed some of the assets, liabilities and obligations but not everything. When I sold a company that is how it was handled.).
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- _delirium 14y agoAlthough it still wouldn't be a cost-effective use of time, a sufficiently peeved customer could file a small-claims suit for a return of the fee (or some portion of it).
- larrys 14y agoActually not a bad strategy assuming the venue is convenient. A corporation has to be defended by an attorney while an individual can be pro se. As a result the corporation would typically want to settle rather than spend money to go to defend in court. My guess is as long as the person filing the suit didn't blog about it and bring attention to the action beforehand there would be incentive to settle this out of small claims court. The amount settled for could easily be the value over time of the "lifetime" benefit. If the company choose to go to small claims court and lost it would certainly not be to their benefit as it would show others what was possible and set some precedent. Keep in mind that even if the company feels their contract is airtight they might decide to settle simply to not have to pay legal fees in many cases.
- TomGullen 14y agoHad a similar experience with an old host, promised "lifetime price freeze". A couple of years later they started charging me more as they had 'moved me to a new server' which I fiercely contested. In the end we settled for a compromise.
- Dylan16807 14y agoRidiculous, since the reason to get a new server is that it's cheaper per cycle/byte/watt.
- sp332 14y agoSomeone already started a Google group for people to discuss where to move their hosting: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ex-joyeurs https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ex-joyeurs
- timkeller 14y ago> "...and noticed that you are one of the few customers that are still on our early products..." One of the few? Cool. It's not costing you that much to keep them on their lifetime plan. Surely its not worth the negative PR? Not sure what Joyent is thinking.
- gaoshan 14y agoThey try to make it seem like we are a couple of dozen duffers who never really use the service anyway. What a gimmick.
- mikeash 14y agoIt's always amusing when companies (or people) contradict themselves to rationalize their decisions. The ongoing costs of this service are too large for us to sustain! By the way, only a few obscure people are using it so it will impact virtually nobody!
- wmf 14y agoThe service may have high fixed costs. If they have one person maintaining something that's used by very few customers the cost per customer would be very high.
- robinbowes 14y agoMuch suckage. Lifetime means lifetime. It wouldn't be too much out of the way to provide a small host for "lifetime" users. I have complained to joyent.
- smackfu 14y agoI wonder why they are this dumb. It's like buying bad press. Did they really think this wouldn't get out and make them a mockery? Would it really cost that much to continue providing something to these people forever, so they wouldn't have to say the lifetime is over? Dumb dumb dumb.
- robinbowes 14y agoBTW, I too have moved to the Solaris hosting.
- patrickgzill 14y agoSeems a little odd, surely with the cheaper RAM, far more powerful CPUs and inexpensive disks these days, they could spend a few $$$ and burn a couple of U , keeping their customers happy? I don't know how many servers they would have needed in 2007 to provide the services they sold, but surely now they could consolidate all those users onto 1/4 the machines? What is this negative press costing them?
- wmf 14y agoI think the real issue is that Joyent no longer provides any form of shared hosting and they don't want to. So they have no equivalent service to migrate the old lifetime customers to. They'd probably lose quite a bit of money if they migrate lifetime customers to their cloud.
- slig 14y agoI bet they're going to lose more in bad PR. People here usually do not forget fuck ups.
- grandalf 14y agoI've been warning people about Joyent for a few years now. A few years back I was using them for some hosting and they were dishonest about their shared filesystem issues.
- ljoshua 14y agoTextDrive was a great host back in the day (I signed up around 2004) and I was also happy with Joyent as well. They've obviously changed target markets since then, which is unfortunate, but I think the offer they made is certainly palatable and a sign of good will. All good things must come to an end, and then you go on to the next good company.
- gexla 14y agoDear Jones, we said "till death do us part" but you are now divorcing me. :( In case you didn't get it, Jones is the name of the shared server that I'm on. ;)
- btipling 14y agoSplit the company in two, one with lifetime accounts one without. One with lifetime accounts goes bankrupt immediately. Promise kept, goals achieved!
- tomson 14y agoOutraged, too. Any suitable alternatives in sight?
- tomson 14y agoWhere is Dean Allen now that we need him?
- keithpeter 14y agoHe seems to have disappeared, apart from sporadic tweets. A quieter version of Mark Pilgrim and _why?. Is this normal for successful Web entrepreneurs?
- prodigal_erik 14y agoThis was the same service that had an outage last year which took over two days to recover from, for which their answer was basically "what did you expect, we're neglecting that server"? Sad thing is, putting the bottom line before responsibility is probably an effective strategy because the market does not penalize it sufficiently.
- graue 14y agoFunny you mention that. My server with them (shared hosting, lifetime account) just had a two-day outage Monday through Wednesday and still isn't totally recovered.
- cletus 14y agoIt never ceases to amaze me how many people "fall" for this "lifetime" pricing model. In fact I said the exact same thing three months ago [1]. The fact that the service provider is not getting any future revenue from you, even if they've fairly discounted your lifetime value, gives them the incentive to get rid of you. Additionally it gives the wrong incentives to users to "abuse" their "unlimited" service. You saw this with AT&T's "unlimited" wireless data plans recently [2]. I know why people do it: as an alternative to raising capital. Businesses do Groupons for the same reason. In fact, I'm feeling like a broken record here [3]. The problem with Groupon (and similar "offer" sites) is they create the wrong incentives and attract the worst kind of customer. The best situation for Groupon and for businesses is for lots of people to buy the offers and then not to use them. The lesson here is that if you want to create a sustainable and liked business, you need to align your incentives with those of your customers [4]. As a customer, stop falling for this charade. As a business, stop taking short term cash flows for perpetual liabilities just to raise capital. Seriously. EDIT: regarding "unlimited" (in Karunamon's comment), he is correct: we do need to hold companies to a higher standard. For example, Australia's ACCC (I guess equivalent to the FTC but with a heavy focus on consumer rights) has cracked down on the use of "unlimited" (eg [5]). But that just reinforces my point. In Australia pretty much all Internet plans have stated quotas. With unlimited plans you create the wrong incentives to throttle users, impose nebulous "fair use" conditions and generally whittle away at what's really "unlimited". It's the wrong incentive system. With Internet quotas at least you know you're getting what you pay for and your plan is priced for your usage, not some median or 95% usage that will constantly have the provider trying to throttle "power users". [1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3936701 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3936701 [2]: http://mashable.com/2012/03/01/att-limits-unlimited-data/ http://mashable.com/2012/03/01/att-limits-unlimited-data/ [3]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2649739 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2649739 [4]: http://www.accountingweb.com/blogs/ronaldbaker/firms-future/incentives-matter http://www.accountingweb.com/blogs/ronaldbaker/firms-future/... [5]: http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2010/12/accc-taking-tpg-to-court-over-unlimited-plans/ http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2010/12/accc-taking-tpg-to-cour...
- holgate 14y agoWell, 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.
- buntar 14y agoDear Joyent You got me: "We've been analyzing customer usage of Joyent’s systems and noticed that you are one of the few customers that are still on our early products and have not migrated to our new platform, the Joyent Cloud." So sorry about not appreciating enough your new platform because " Everyone that’s moved to our new cloud infrastructure has been pleased with the results". About the whole "lifetime" ("As long as we exist.") thing ... Stupid me. I never get that. I mean that was meant metaphorically, right, like in marriages? Ok then, you divorced me. Thanks that I can still sleep under your roof for one and a half month. And yes: You keep the house. And the money. I keep my files. I think, we can call this a true a win-win situation. Sorry, I mean "win-win". Sincerely.
- phearlez 14y agoTwo and a half months, actually. Which is still a lot less than the lifetime we were promised (unless you're a fruitfly or something, I guess) but you have a little longer to migrate your stuff.
- raganwald 14y agoThe fairest way to offer "lifetime" or "unlimited" plans is to include a simple warranty: "If we ever cancel this plan, we will refund your money in full."
- brey 14y agoyup. I'd be suspicious of any "unlimited" plan which didn't offer such a guarantee - anything that doesn't put its money where its mouth is is just marketing, a polite euphemism for "lies" in this case. or time-bound it, so everyone's clear - if I know I'm buying a 10 year plan, that's fine. I know I'm getting value for money, and the service provider knows they have a finite projected cost.
- mikeash 14y agoI'd think that such a warranty would be implied. It's a standard expectation that if you can't deliver what a customer paid for, you refund their money. If it's an ongoing service, then you can prorate the refund... but for a lifetime service, they've always used 0% of it and should thus get a 100% refund.
- raganwald 14y agoThe other way to look at it is that the service provider is borrowing money from you and paying you in services instead of interest. They have the right to pay the principal of the loan back at any time. If their cost to provide the service is below the market cost of loaning them money, the difference is their margin. They simply need to price the "lifetime service" appropriately such that there's a market demand for it. If the price the market will pay is too little relative to their cost to provide the service, then they don't have a viable "lifetime offering."
- weel 14y agoOr better yet, the current annual price of the plan divided by the current yield on British consols.
- port_rhombus 14y agoSeriously though, the printout I have from March 29, 2006 of their Mixed Grill offer says "One-time payment of $499" and "How long is it good for? As long as we exist." That constitutes a contract which they are clearly trying very hard to ignore. It seems so petty given their success, available resources, and the very manageable limited bandwidth and quota'd storage space us lifetime customers are allocated.
- thirdstation 14y agoThey did the same for their perpetually paying customers too. When I signed up for my TextDrive account it was billed as one price ($10/month) forever. Then Joyent bought them and things were OK for a while but I figured that was the end of my price guarantee. My biggest issue with Joyent is they seem to change their services every year or two while letting their legacy customers languish. I used to have an account on a shared host. Now I have a Smart Machine, or maybe a Shared Accelerator. I'm not sure anymore and they keep changing the support website. Now I just use them for mail but, I'm dissatisfied with that so I'm looking to move. What I want is to pay for a service and not worry about it. It's too much work being their customer nowadays.
- gaoshan 14y agoJoyent just offered me 50% of my original investment back as a payout. Anyone else hearing this? Might be more lucrative than whatever a class-action lawsuit would return to each of us. Might take them up on it as it's better than the hosting deal they are offering (given that i want nothing to do with them, anyway... dollar for dollar it seems about equal).
- velcrovan 14y agoVC here...How did you get this? Did it come in response to a support ticket? Did you ask them for a full refund? Is half of your original investment $100 or more like $1000?
- gaoshan 14y agoI asked for a full refund. They came back with "half".
- coopdog 14y agoShould be more like "triple" or some other multiple, given the risk the early adopters took. Joyent used that capital and expanded it many, many times.
- falava 14y agoI have obtained 50% refund also (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396503 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396503)
- tomson 14y agoRetrace your footsteps back to your original upgrade and cross-grade package. http://textusers.com/wiki/Lifetime_plans http://textusers.com/wiki/Lifetime_plans One disgruntled VC200
- obiefernandez 14y agoHere's the answer you'll get if you write to their support complaining about the change: Hi Obie, As often happens in the software business, vendors “end of life” older platforms and migrate customers to new versions or platforms. The service you purchased a “lifetime subscription” to will no longer be supported or available from Joyent. On the other hand, we appreciate and value your business as an early customer. As such, we have created special offers specifically for you to make this transition as easy as possible. Details and promo codes were provided to you in the email. I hope you will be able to take us up on the offer and see the benefits of our new platform. Thanks, ------------------ Peter Yorke Senior Solutions Architect JoyentCloud.com
- holgate 14y agoThat'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.
- falava 14y agoI have obtained 50% refund from the support desk by replying to the sunset email and asking for it. This morning I found this Jason Hoffman post about the EOL and a possible refund here and added to my response email: http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=240955#p240955 http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=240955#p240955 In my case and theirs, I consider this partial refund ok because I have been using his service 8 years and now I will move my small sites to a cheaper host.
- michaelhoffman 14y agoIn that situation I might write back: Dear Peter, Thank you for your "message." I find your breach of contract totally "unacceptable" and I will see you in "court." Michael
- hboon 14y agoI wrote back several words with a link http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=64656#p64656 http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=64656#p64656 as well as a screenshot like http://cl.ly/image/2y3k0x3p3a0v http://cl.ly/image/2y3k0x3p3a0v. Let's see where that brings us.
- thedeuce 14y agoseems like joyent are nothing but snake oil salesmen
- forgotAgain 14y agoTo anyone thinking of Joyent for cloud services: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, ...
- danyork 14y agoJoyent seems to be doing some general housecleaning... I received a similar notice (same first paragraphs) related to the closure of their http://no.de/ http://no.de/ Node.js hosting service: ---- Joyent is retiring the No.de service. If, as a Node.js developer, you prefer a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, we suggest that you consider our third-party partner, Nodejitsu, who offers a Node.js PaaS that runs on Joyent. Joyent continues to provide an ideal cloud infrastructure to run your Node.js applications, with performance and debugging tools that no other cloud provides. Sign up for a free trial on Nodejitsu (www.nodejitsu.com) or take advantage of Joyent Cloud's 30-Day Free Trial using this promotional code. ----
- officemonkey 14y agoThe fact that I got a good deal for hosting in retrospect is irrelevant. Joyent offered lifetime service in exchange for a large payment up front. It wasn't just a one time deal they regretted. They made lifetime offers on numerous occasions. It was their business model at the time, no one forced them. Here's a very easy solution for Joyent. Refund my money. My payment was for lifetime service. Pay me back and we'll call it quits.
- NateEag 14y agoI'm another Mixed Grill customer, currently on a shared Solaris box. When I bought it, I knew it was a gamble, and with the $500 spread over 6.5ish years, it's not a terrible ROI. I assumed I'd lose out due to the company eventually folding, though. "As long as we exist" seemed pretty straightforward, and what I knew about them didn't leave me believing that they'd just pull the plug like this. I've updated their Wikipedia page with a short section that I believe summarizes the situation accurately and factually, without letting my emotions creep in too much - if anyone cares to edit it, have at it. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Joyent http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Joyent Joyent, I'm disappointed. You had a few memorable tech disasters, but never before did I personally experience ill will from you. I had begun to trust you guys.
- justinhj 14y agoThis reminds me I bought a lifetime license for Visual Studio in the 90's. Less than a year later they revoked it ans esent q cheque for $50 and a copy of Visual Java
- po 14y agoLooks like Jason Hoffman has stepped into the forums to explain the reasoning behind their decision and do some damage control: http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=240955#p240955 http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=240955#p240955 They probably should have done that on the original letter.
- rdl 14y agoWow. Either Joyent is financially doomed on its own (and is trying to cut costs), or is just really stupid. EOLing an old lifetime product with high support costs makes sense. What they should have done was moved the "small number of customers" using Lifetime service onto a new lifetime platform using their shared hosting platform. The plan they're offering for a year seems like an adequate replacement -- the cost of providing that low tier of service forever is probably not much more than the cost of providing it for a year. Maybe make it opt-in, so inactive accounts don't spin up on the new platform, and provide some higher level of service at a discount (so, instead of a $50/yr cloud plan for free, you could optionally get a $250/yr plan for $150/yr.)
- blues 14y ago"There's a sucker born every minute" -- usually attributed to P. T. Barnum. The people who got sucked into buying into this "Joyent ending ‘lifetime’ hosting accounts" hustle probably got the greatest bargain of their lives. I'll bet they were mostly young folks, ever chasing after that proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow (although some never quit). Hoping for endless service with no further incentive for the provider. What a priceless lesson at such a small cost! This company has actually taught one of life's great lessons for a truly paltry sum! Anyway, here's what I do: I register my domains at nearlyfreespeech.net. They have a somewhat limited number of different TLDs available, and at about $9 per year, are not cheap (or "free"), but certainly not exorbitant. But their integrity is rock-solid. One time I let my domain expire for a couple weeks, an alarming circumstance. But they restored it for free after I simply payed the fee (this can only work for a limited time, of course). My old (and reliable) previous host and registrar would have charged me about $200 to get it back! So the $9 is like cheap insurance. I use asmallorange.com as my host. They charge as little as $35 per YEAR, with $0.50 per GB per month for additional bandwidth. (Both of these hosts are "pay as you go.") So if I ever have a disagreement with my host, they cannot mess with my domain name! Also, my registrar uses FreeBSD servers, while my host uses Linux, and I don’t want to deal with FreeBSD (it’s probably more stable than Linux, but I know nothing about how to use it). The smallorange service (running on Linux) is chock-full of great features, including Cpanel. They have a feature inside their Cpanel that one-click installs things like WordPress, and I used it. But I chose a one-click install password that it allowed, but that the rest of Cpanel would not allow, and that lead to problems. But their customer service was right there for me, and they immediately cleared it up. Hope this doesn't sound spammy. The main point is, if you really want service, pay as you go is the way to get it. It worked great for me.
- fingerprinter 14y agoI have quite a few static sites on them right now (personal, friends and family). Looking for a reasonable host that won't cost a bunch. Any recommendations?
- ksec 14y agoThey could have just refund ALL of those money as credits for JoyentCloud. Would this be a better solution? So you essentially got "x" years of hosting plus Those money back as credits.
- cct 14y agoThis is fraud, no contest. The real question is what's the best way to deal with it. 1. Social pressure to re-instate equivalent service (1.5gb for me) 2. numerous small claims court applications (full refund + migration costs/damages) 3. Class action (similar to above). To make any of them work to full effect, we'd probably have to band together? Any argument as to which method is preferred? CCT
- falava 14y agoIf you are a VC/MG/3ML like me, I think you can ask support for a partial refund. I did it, now let's see... Jason Hoffman says that and other interesting things about the EOL here (read all of his posts): http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=240955#p240955 http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=240955#p240955
- NateEag 14y agoFor anyone who's interested, a "Money back or five free years of your own virtual server" offer has been posted by Jason Hoffman: http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?id=33682 http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?id=33682 It doesn't come close to honoring the "as long as we exist" that we bought in for, but it's a lot better than the starting position, and Jason is talking a little about why we're being cut. (From what I can see, it looks like cutting the lifers may have been a requirement of some of the recent VC investors. That's me reading between the lines a bit, though.)
- mgrimes 14y agoMy two cents: http://stateful.net/joyent-refugee/ http://stateful.net/joyent-refugee/