Public
Joyent ending "Lifetime" hosting accounts.
Some years ago when Joyent (then TexDrive) was young and strapped for cash they offered "Lifetime" hosting accounts apparently by "lifetime" they meant until we get tired of supporting them.......
Action Required:
Legacy Service End of Life
Dear Ken McKinney,
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.
For many business reasons, including infrastructure performance, service quality and manageability, these early products are nearing their End of Life. We plan to sunset these services on October 31, 2012 and we'd like to walk you through a few options.
We understand this might be an inconvenience for you, but we have a plan and options to make this transition as easy as possible. We’ve been developing more functionality on our new cloud infrastructure, the Joyent Cloud, for our customers who care about performance, resiliency and security. Now’s the time to take advantage of all the new capabilities you don’t have today. Everyone that’s moved to our new cloud infrastructure has been pleased with the results.
We appreciate and value you as one of Joyent's lifetime Shared Hosting customers. As this service is one of our earliest offerings, and has now run its course, your lifetime service will end on October 31, 2012. However, we believe that you will enjoy the new functionalities of the Joyent Cloud. To show you our appreciation, as one of Joyent's lifetime Shared Hosting customers, we'd like to offer you a free 512MB SmartMachine on the Joyent Cloud for one year. Use this promotional code to redeem the offer.
[Redacted]
Please review the Terms and Conditions for the Joyent Cloud One Year Free 512 MB Machine Promotion by visiting this link.
To find out more about the Joyent Cloud and your options, please follow this link to our migration center for additional details.
Sincerely,
Jason Hoffman
Founder and CTO
Joyent
jason@joyent.com
Some years ago when Joyent (then TexDrive) was young and strapped for cash they offered "Lifetime" hosting accounts apparently by "lifetime" they meant until we get tired of supporting them.......
Action Required:
Legacy Service End of Life
Dear Ken McKinney,
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.
For many business reasons, including infrastructure performance, service quality and manageability, these early products are nearing their End of Life. We plan to sunset these services on October 31, 2012 and we'd like to walk you through a few options.
We understand this might be an inconvenience for you, but we have a plan and options to make this transition as easy as possible. We’ve been developing more functionality on our new cloud infrastructure, the Joyent Cloud, for our customers who care about performance, resiliency and security. Now’s the time to take advantage of all the new capabilities you don’t have today. Everyone that’s moved to our new cloud infrastructure has been pleased with the results.
We appreciate and value you as one of Joyent's lifetime Shared Hosting customers. As this service is one of our earliest offerings, and has now run its course, your lifetime service will end on October 31, 2012. However, we believe that you will enjoy the new functionalities of the Joyent Cloud. To show you our appreciation, as one of Joyent's lifetime Shared Hosting customers, we'd like to offer you a free 512MB SmartMachine on the Joyent Cloud for one year. Use this promotional code to redeem the offer.
[Redacted]
Please review the Terms and Conditions for the Joyent Cloud One Year Free 512 MB Machine Promotion by visiting this link.
To find out more about the Joyent Cloud and your options, please follow this link to our migration center for additional details.
Sincerely,
Jason Hoffman
Founder and CTO
Joyent
jason@joyent.com
View 82 previous comments
There have been questions about the number of us affected by Joyent's redefinition of "lifetime". So count me as a VCIII buyer who paid more money to upgrade to MG.Aug 20, 2012
Question about the potential of a class action lawsuit. Does one need to be a US citizen to partake? What efforts are required?Aug 20, 2012
I'm also interested in joining a class action suit. Their offers are a bit offensive given that they are blatantly breaching the contract.Aug 21, 2012
I have been going back and forth with Joyent (Peter Yorke) and standing firm. This is the latest response I've recieved:
Peter Yorke, Aug 22 14:35 (PDT)
Hi James
Thank you for your patience on this issue. Due to an overwhelming and passionate response from our Lifetime and Shared Hosting customers, we are evaluating a few options right now for the best path forward for our community of users.
In the meantime, there is no change in your service; however, we will get back to you soon with an update on this.Aug 22, 2012
The latest development:
http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=242477#p242477
Dean
Chief Recalcitrant Officer
From: South of France
Registered: 2004-05-29
Posts: 845
Website Expertise
Re: Legacy EOL
Hi, good to see everyone.
Steps are being taken to relaunch TextDrive as a separate company, run by me, with services, promises, early investment and good faith intact, running on hardware not powered by drunken late-summer wasps, with a future more dominant than a past.
Details are to follow, we're still out hammering them; please don't pepper support with questions!
Provided this goes ahead, I expect to have an official announcement sent out Monday 27.
Up yer very handsome kilt,
- dcaAug 25, 2012- For those not receiving the emails, or reading the joyent forums... here's an email sent from Dean:
---------
If we haven't met, I'm Dean Allen, a founder of TextDrive, the shared hosting company started by Jason Hoffman and me in 2004. I'm also a founder and erstwhile President of Joyent, which some time ago merged with TextDrive, though I haven't been active with that company for a while.
If we have met, I hope it went okay.
A couple of weeks ago I received, at the same time as Joyent’s shared hosting customers, a message announcing an end to support for shared hosting, affecting customers who’ve been with us for years, some of whom invested in accounts we had intended to support for the rest of the life of the company. The announcement struck many as abrupt. Some took it to be an abandonment of, if not an insult to, your good faith, written in marketing and lawyer speak.
I soon spoke with my friend Jason, who by then was deluged with abusive emails and imaginative threats. After I rubbed some salt in his wounds, we began imagining what it would take to continue providing what we'd intended all along to those who put their faith in us. After some wrangling, we’ve found a way to make it work.
I’d like to announce that on November 1st, 2012, TextDrive will relaunch anew as a separate hosting company, staffed and funded, run by me. Please consider the recently announced end-of-life for Joyent’s shared hosting customers now revised to be a continuation-of-life, to be carried out in the same friendly, creative, publishing-centered spirit of TextDrive’s early days.
No matter its humble beginnings, Joyent now operates in a very big arena, producing heavy artillery for the armies of cloud computing, and it's been years since the company has been structured to service the retail hosting customer. Moreover, the servers on which your accounts still reside are old, slow, inefficient, and they go down on occasion. Everyone deserves better.
Current shared hosting customers can expect to have at least double the resources provisioned have now, running on vastly more stable and efficient infrastructure. Running, in fact, on the very heavy artillery mentioned above.
I intend to have all current paying and lifetime shared hosting customers moved from our old data centers to new, modern and efficient infrastructure by November 1. We'll be doing all we can to automate the migration process and keep discomfort at bay. More communications and instructions on the migration process will follow. For now, know that Joyent shared hosting customers, whether paid or lifetime, are now TextDrive customers and that service will not be interrupted.
For updates and resources click here.
It gives me great pleasure to indicate that I’ll talk to you soon.
[The link goes here: http://joyent.com/migration ]Aug 30, 2012
