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I was one of the original 200 to back TextDrive in with the VC200 accounts. The risk, of course, was that the venture wouldn't be successful and we'd be laying

I was one of the original 200 to back TextDrive in with the VC200 accounts. The risk, of course, was that the venture wouldn't be successful and we'd be laying out $200 for less than $200 worth of hosting. If they were successful, $200 would buy a reasonable shared hosting account for life. Far from being naive and "falling" for the pricing model, my assessment was that 1) 200 shared hosting accounts (one server?) is a completely plausible lifetime offering for a successful hosting company, 2) $200 is a low risk punt, and 3) these are good guys and I think they can realistically make a go of it TextDrive was a success, now continues to be a success as Joyent, and 200 shared hosting accounts (the state of play when I signed up) should be trivial for them to provide - even if they outsource that obligation to another provider. I know I wasn't wrong about them being good guys (they are), but that's why I'm bewildered by today's announcement. It may not be economically viable for them to provide these services now, but it wasn't economically viable for them to start a hosting company until we backed it. That was the deal. Joyent has an obligation to keep these services online, and if that means they need to take a bit of a hit to do that, then that's what they need to do. Otherwise, I'm unclear how anyone would trust them again.

kenmck 14y ago
Exactly. I can and will be moving elsewhere. My three puny sites can hardly be making their servers tick over the most active only gets ~2000 uniques on a good month.
agravier 14y ago
> Otherwise, I'm unclear how anyone would trust them again. You are giving the average customer way too much behavioral credit. Companies abuse confidence because they can get away with it, of course.
Isofarro 14y ago
I'm guessing from http://textusers.com/wiki/VC200 http://textusers.com/wiki/VC200 this $200 hosting offer was in 2004, eight years ago. $200 up-front comes to a bit above $2 a month. In 2004, shared hosting with PHP/MySQL was the standard hosting package. A good quality Cpanel account at that time was about $15-$20 per month. So you've gotten an exceptionally good deal. Around that time Dreamhost became the place to be. quickly followed by a series of lengthy outages that utterly destroyed it's reputation. Other Cpanel-powered hosts popped up, went under, merged, acquired, disappeared, reappeared, went down, never came back out. Fast-forward to today, shared hosting is just a race-to-the-bottom barrel scraping. Margins are practically non-existent. Every kid with a bedroom computer has their own Reseller account and pretend they have their own hosting company. Pricing on that seems to be about $4 a year, but the quality is absolutely dire, and that's when the server is actually online. Shared hosting is largely a dead industry today, it bottom-feeds because their top-end audience grew into dedicated servers, and their average and above average end customers are comfortable running their own cheap VPS. Safe in the knowledge that it's very much harder for another customer to take down everyone's website. Shared hosting is no longer a sustainable business model. You got a great ride for your money, you got a very good deal. Now it's time to move on. Grab yourself a VPS, and take a step up to the next curve on the online hosting technology stack. It's well past time. Good quality shared hosting, with great support is getting more and more expensive, because the market for it is dwindling down to people who can't or won't take the step up towards VPS/Dedicated servers - that means the support cost per customer rises. And that isn't a sustainable process. If the average monthly price you paid for good quality hosting on TextDrive/Joyent is under $10 because of these packages, well done, you got a tremendously good deal. How would you have rated the service you received before you received the email/message? Think about that - consider if the support/service you received related to the per month price you've paid. Now go out and find a web hosting offer that will give you the same quality of service, for the same monthly price - and switch to that. I get a feeling, apart from special offers that will surface because of this, you'll be hard-pressed to find an equivalent. But seriously people, "lifetime" and "unlimited" are the two emptiest words in the language of web resource offers. You know that. I'd feel sad for you if you only got 1 years hosting for your $200 for such features. But if you got 8 years for your initial outlay, and you still feel you deserve more... that's a text-book example of bottom-feeding. Quite the sort of customer a web hosting company wouldn't miss. A class action? That would be amusing.
- wmf 14y ago
  Everything you say makes sense, and yet... the reason it was called the "VC" plan is that the customers could expect to get many times more service than they paid for if Joyent was successful. And Joyent has been successful, although by pivoting into a different market. (I realize it wasn't an actual investment; no need to pedantically point that out.) (Edit: I see _delirium already made this argument.) Would you call the Facebook mural artist a "bottom-feeder" for actually trying to cash in his stock because it's worth "too much"? http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/07/facebook-graffiti-artist-could-be-worth-500-million/ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/07/facebook-graffiti-a...
- holgate 14y ago
  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.
  - Isofarro 14y ago
    "Scroll down and you'll find users whose per-month equivalent is comparable to a bottom-end Linode VPS." They are objecting to equivalently paying -- at worst -- bottom-end Linode VPS prices for web hosting. That's why I have this bemused look on my face.
    - pndmnm 14y ago
      Not really -- they're objecting to having invested in the early stages of a company in good faith that the company would keep its promises. If they wanted dirt-cheap shared hosting, there were plenty of other ways to get it, even at the time (1and1's three-year free deal comes to mind). Most of the people I know who still use their lifetime accounts use them for hosting small static sites, e-mail, et cetera, with the specific goal of "not having to think about hosting". That's what they were buying. And they're getting screwed out of it.
tripzilch 14y ago
So, what is it? I'm hearing different amounts in these threads, $200, $500 and further down even someone saying they paid $1399 for a hosting contract?

kenmck 14y ago

Exactly. I can and will be moving elsewhere. My three puny sites can hardly be making their servers tick over the most active only gets ~2000 uniques on a good month.

agravier 14y ago

> Otherwise, I'm unclear how anyone would trust them again. You are giving the average customer way too much behavioral credit. Companies abuse confidence because they can get away with it, of course.

Isofarro 14y ago

I'm guessing from http://textusers.com/wiki/VC200 http://textusers.com/wiki/VC200 this $200 hosting offer was in 2004, eight years ago. $200 up-front comes to a bit above $2 a month. In 2004, shared hosting with PHP/MySQL was the standard hosting package. A good quality Cpanel account at that time was about $15-$20 per month. So you've gotten an exceptionally good deal. Around that time Dreamhost became the place to be. quickly followed by a series of lengthy outages that utterly destroyed it's reputation. Other Cpanel-powered hosts popped up, went under, merged, acquired, disappeared, reappeared, went down, never came back out. Fast-forward to today, shared hosting is just a race-to-the-bottom barrel scraping. Margins are practically non-existent. Every kid with a bedroom computer has their own Reseller account and pretend they have their own hosting company. Pricing on that seems to be about $4 a year, but the quality is absolutely dire, and that's when the server is actually online. Shared hosting is largely a dead industry today, it bottom-feeds because their top-end audience grew into dedicated servers, and their average and above average end customers are comfortable running their own cheap VPS. Safe in the knowledge that it's very much harder for another customer to take down everyone's website. Shared hosting is no longer a sustainable business model. You got a great ride for your money, you got a very good deal. Now it's time to move on. Grab yourself a VPS, and take a step up to the next curve on the online hosting technology stack. It's well past time. Good quality shared hosting, with great support is getting more and more expensive, because the market for it is dwindling down to people who can't or won't take the step up towards VPS/Dedicated servers - that means the support cost per customer rises. And that isn't a sustainable process. If the average monthly price you paid for good quality hosting on TextDrive/Joyent is under $10 because of these packages, well done, you got a tremendously good deal. How would you have rated the service you received before you received the email/message? Think about that - consider if the support/service you received related to the per month price you've paid. Now go out and find a web hosting offer that will give you the same quality of service, for the same monthly price - and switch to that. I get a feeling, apart from special offers that will surface because of this, you'll be hard-pressed to find an equivalent. But seriously people, "lifetime" and "unlimited" are the two emptiest words in the language of web resource offers. You know that. I'd feel sad for you if you only got 1 years hosting for your $200 for such features. But if you got 8 years for your initial outlay, and you still feel you deserve more... that's a text-book example of bottom-feeding. Quite the sort of customer a web hosting company wouldn't miss. A class action? That would be amusing.

wmf 14y ago
Everything you say makes sense, and yet... the reason it was called the "VC" plan is that the customers could expect to get many times more service than they paid for if Joyent was successful. And Joyent has been successful, although by pivoting into a different market. (I realize it wasn't an actual investment; no need to pedantically point that out.) (Edit: I see _delirium already made this argument.) Would you call the Facebook mural artist a "bottom-feeder" for actually trying to cash in his stock because it's worth "too much"? http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/07/facebook-graffiti-artist-could-be-worth-500-million/ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/07/facebook-graffiti-a...
holgate 14y ago
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.
- Isofarro 14y ago
  "Scroll down and you'll find users whose per-month equivalent is comparable to a bottom-end Linode VPS." They are objecting to equivalently paying -- at worst -- bottom-end Linode VPS prices for web hosting. That's why I have this bemused look on my face.
  - pndmnm 14y ago
    Not really -- they're objecting to having invested in the early stages of a company in good faith that the company would keep its promises. If they wanted dirt-cheap shared hosting, there were plenty of other ways to get it, even at the time (1and1's three-year free deal comes to mind). Most of the people I know who still use their lifetime accounts use them for hosting small static sites, e-mail, et cetera, with the specific goal of "not having to think about hosting". That's what they were buying. And they're getting screwed out of it.

tripzilch 14y ago

So, what is it? I'm hearing different amounts in these threads, $200, $500 and further down even someone saying they paid $1399 for a hosting contract?