textdrive
dean allen, who agreed to take over the new incarnation of textdrive, has more or less gone awol where it concerns the current customers of textdrive .
added: sometime around feb. 16th, the textdrive wiki became password protected .
dean allen hasn' t posted to the official textdrive forum since november of 2012 .
the textdrive forum has a bit of activity, mostly in the thread discussing alternative hosting options .
so as you can see, textdrive is just kind of sitting there with seemingly no one in charge .
i was told different, by support. i could chose between the 5 year offer, or textdrive .
correction 5: 47 est 03 / 04 / 14: an earlier version of this story incorrectly identified jason hoffman as the co - founder of both joyent and textdrive. he is only the co - founder of textdrive .
i choose to give them the benefit of the doubt. both textdrive and joyent cloud have been highly productive enterprises. i hated to see textdrive fall by the wayside but i still trust them more than a run - of - the - mill exit - seeking startup. i hope the new textdrive makes money and is around for a long time .
in 2004, jason hoffman and dean allen co - founded textdrive. that year, hoffman and his textdrive co - founder offered lifetime subscriptions to textdrive for $ 200, pitching the idea as a way to ensure the company' s future. although the customers weren' t formal investors, they always thought of themselves as a part of the company, even after joyent acquired textdrive in 2005. the subscriptions were honored after the merger, and joyent continued to offer new lifetime subscriptions until at least 2006 .
also, for anyone looking to relocate from textdrive (or just looking for a new web host) you could try out kaizen garden. they' re a new host put together by jacques (a. k. a. the reliable one) from textdrive .
here’s what’s going on: joyent acquired a web hosting company called textdrive back in 2005. textdrive was founded in 2004 by dean allen, creator of the content management systems textile and textpattern, and jason hoffman. as watts martin explains, textdrive sold lifetime subscriptions to customers to fund the company rather than raise venture capital. customers felt like investors in the company. drew mclellan wrote on hacker news :
as techcrunch noted, a company called textdrive had offered lifetime hosting plans as a way to bring in money and avoid seeking venture capital .
as anyone looking for decent support or even useful information over the past few months can attest, the revival of textdrive has not been a success .
joyent shifted its focus over the years from cheap, commodity web hosting packages to more complex cloud infrastructure offerings that compete with amazon web services. then, in august 2012, joyent announced that it would shut down textdrive because the old textdrive servers had become too expensive to maintain. allen, who had left the company, then resurfaced to create a new textdrive hosting service that ran on joyent' s infrastructure, throwing those early investors a lifeline .
in 2005 a company named textdrive - - which had affiliations with joyent at the time - - offered beginning customers lifetime access to web hosting services for an initial invest of $ 499. textdrive eventually folded into joynet and yesterday joyent informed select users that the lifetime web hosting offer would be coming to an end .
the twitter search for
textdrive
has several variations of
what is going on ?
and
where is my site ?
in recent tweets .
remember that the key wording was
as long as the company exists
. once the spinoff is complete, textdrive can be shut down while joyent continues on .
thank you for posting that link, it adds a lot more depth to this story - - anyone not familiar with the textdrive lifetime subscription needs to read this .
so, anyone with anything left on the textdrive servers has less than two weeks to get their content off (and switch dns, transfer email, etc .) .
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 .
joyent followed that tradition and continued to offer lifetime accounts after it acquired textdrive, including the above mentioned offer that said the services would be available “as long as we exist. ”
what began in mid - 2012 as an exciting challenge fueled by good intentions and lean resources quickly turned into a cleanup project with almost no resources ,
the announcement on the company' s website says .
it is disappointing to report that after a year and a half of uphill battles and unimagined setbacks, after several costly efforts to regroup and find another way, options to keep textdrive growing have run out .
foltz says many textdrive customers are moving their sites to kaizen garden, a new hosting service marneweck started after leaving textdrive .
so why make this decision then? joyent’s business has fundamentally changed since the textdrive days. today it sells higher end cloud hosting services, not commodity shared web hosting. hoffman writes :
at the moment, dean allen' s own website seems to be down. i wonder if it happens to be on one of the textdrive servers that can' t seem to stay online .
although most customers feel that they got more than their money' s worth out of the service, many are disappointed with the way the situation was handled by the founders of textdrive and joyent, which used the lifetime memberships to stay afloat during its early years. the demise of textdrive is a cautionary tale for anyone who puts their money into kickstarter campaigns or other efforts to crowdsource venture funding .
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 .
textdrive support was unresponsive to the problems, foltz says, until the announcement this week that the service will be shut down on march 14. allen hasn' t posted to the support forum since november 2012, and his personal website is now offline, and his twitter account hasn' t been updated since june. according to marneweck, textdrive have not paid his salary since it was spun out of joyent in february 2013 .
we are sorry for the inconvenience our change in plans has caused. this is the only option available. we will continue to honor your original lifetime purchase, and you will continue to receive hosting services from textdrive .
the beginning of the end started when textdrive became joyent, we kind of knew that the lifetime hosting would come to an end at some point and to be honest i’m surprised it lasted as long as it did. when textdrive re - emerged (spat out) from joyent late in 2012 in a brave move to support the lifetime hosting accounts everyone was happy, although there was a sense of something fighting a brave retreat with no direction .
what started to seem like a promising rebirth of textdrive, after the bungled jettison of customers from joyent, has once again turned sour. really sour. in fact, it appears that no one is minding the store anymore .
suffice it to say that his view, and the offer, whether tongue - in - cheek or not, to send t - shirts that read
i bought a lifetime hosting account at textdrive and all i got is this lousy t - shirt ,
fell woefully short, further antagonizing many and creating a neat package of negative pr that will likely follow the company for some time. joyent and textdrive made some critical mistakes that entrepreneurs should learn from :
dean allen resurfaced after a year awol to post a message about the end of service in march 2014. textdrive legend jacques marneweck @ txdjm started a new hosting company called kaizen garden, which already looks like being a huge success .
i believe the issue at hand was that textdrive sold
lifetime
hosting packages, was then subsumed by joyent, who then (about a decade later) reneged on the lifetime hosting packages, scheduling them for cancellation later this year .
update march 3, 2014: well, it looks like we have our answer. the textdrive home page was wiped of any real content, and this message was posted to the urltoken domain (taking down the forums in the process) :
but the experiment didn' t quite pan out – at least not for the mini - vcs. on march 14, according to a message posted to its website, textdrive will shut down, after months of unreliable service and no technical support .
the
lifetime hosting
deal i signed up for years ago looks like it is finally going belly up. i' ve moved anything hosted on textdrive elsewhere. right now, i' m more an observer of this mess than anything else .
it' s a sour note for textdrive to end on, even though foltz and other customers did get several hundred dollars worth of hosting out of joyent and textdrive over the years. mostly, they feel like they' re not being properly appreciated by joyent, which went on to raise over $ 100 million in venture capital from more traditional sources .
if you look at it from the perspective of making an investment and believing in someone, then, yeah, i think we were given the cold shoulder ,
he says .
is the new textdrive supposed to be financially self - sufficient? that doesn' t seem possibly. even if joyent gives them all the hardware and bandwidth for free, who is going to pay for the support and maintenance? the handful of paying shared hosting customers ?
it is disappointing to report that after a year and a half of uphill battles and unimagined setbacks, after several costly efforts to regroup and find another way, options to keep textdrive growing have run out, and we will cease operations on the 14th of march, 2014 .
many affected users seem particularly upset because they viewed their initial investment in the web hosting services as a sort of crowd - sourced venture investment to help get textdrive off the ground. in response for taking a chance on the company and investing in it, they were promised the lifetime of services .
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 .
it showed an inventive approach to running a business. there are always more sources for money than vcs, and textdrive' s management dean allen calculated that the cost of carrying some people perpetually would be more than offset by the advantages of not having to sell part of the company and getting enough cash to start the business .
the end of the road for textdrive has been on the cards for a number of months. tickets have gone unanswered, dean allen, the saviour of all things td has been awol since the split from joyent and the entire infrastructure was bravely supported by jacques marneweck, a single engineer in south africa who as it turned out, wasn’t getting paid .
image from joyent website. according to this archive posted on the community forum, the initial offer cost $ 499 and included 15 top - level domains, 20gb of bandwidth per month and 2gb of storage space from textdrive, along with a
complete hosted application suite
from joyent for up to five users that is good for
as long as we exist .
and so it ended. many are still bitter at joyent turning its back on its initial investors, but in reality usd 200 for ten years hosting represents astonishing value for money at usd 1. 5 per month. technology continues to move at a blistering pace and is incredibly fickle, so with that in mind we’d have been fools to think that textdrive could have lasted forever .
in 2006, textdrive became part of cloud computing company joyent. both companies shared a co - founder in common and had complementary services and products. initially joyent promised to continue to support the lifetime accounts
for as long as we exist .
but it didn' t last. joyent ultimately decided to stop offering lifetime hosted accounts, not only for new customers, but also for those who had previously held them .
created in 2004, the web hosting service offered lifetime subscriptions for a mere $ 200, and those who signed up and paid their money were billed as
mini - vcs
– mini - venture capitalists – who would help feed the progress of the company and receive a life' s worth of service in return. cloud computing company joyent honored these subscriptions after acquiring textdrive in 2005, and even continued selling these mini - vc packages .
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 .
jacques marneweck, former director of operations for the new incarnation of textdrive, says in an e - mail that the new venture was initially part of joyent, but was then spun - out as a separate company. everything was fine until last year, when the service became increasingly unreliable .
people were complaining about their servers going down for a week or so ,
says foltz .
i think mine was down for about three days in november .
i no longer trust them to offer a similar shared hosting service a) reliably and b) actually lifetime. it was probably never a good idea to finance a company this way and it' s certainly not a good idea to spin this off into a new company with zero paying customers but actual real life costs that can no longer be written off as a cost of doing business. how long before this new textdrive folds? 5 years, 6 months ?
a story of corporate communication amateur hour; so i have to read on hn that my textdrive / joyent hosting is stopping. bit pissed i write an email to support that i' d like more time to move stuff and that a refund would be nice. i get a canned reply with a repeat of the email mentioned on hn. then on their support forums the joyent president suddenly is all helpful and grants everyone refunds. we' ll have to ask / haggle with support about it though. so i email support again quoting their fearless leader. this time the support staff promptly grants me a refund (which i haven' t heard or seen anything about since i should add). i' m happy enough with that outcome for now though and start moving all my sites to other hosting options. fast forward to today (about a week later). again on hn (still not on that mailing list it seems) i have to read that textdrive is restarting after all (tada !) and we can keep our precious hosting accounts running. wow, thanks good timing as well. can i still get my refund and get the f out though ?
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 .
textdrive pro easy to use & configure phone automation app / auto responder that can be used for various purposes. can be used for safe driving, meetings, good sleeping, etc. just turn text auto responder on and it will run in the background and auto reply to calls and texts. features: ✔ able to read incoming sms text messages and auto reply with a custom message ✔ automatic activation via familiar bluetooth device ✔ able to decline calls and let the frequent callers come through (urgent calls) ✔ reads the caller' s and the sender' s name ✔ able to setup a separate response to calls and sms ✔ set text auto responder to send only one auto reply to the same person during activation ✔ reply to the same contact once again after a predefined amount of time ✔ set text auto responder only to auto reply to your contacts ✔ set sms autoresponder to auto reply only to calls or only to texts ✔ set presets with different configurations for different purposes, such as driving or meetings ✔ reads messages from popular messaging apps and email clients ✔ set the text to speech (tts) language and speed from the available options on your device ✔ much more to come... ☆ this is an ad free version of textdrive, ad supported version can be downloaded here: ☆ urltoken
it’s not that customers haven’t gotten their money’s worth. textdrive shared hosting service was priced at $ 12 a month in 2006. that means five years of that service alone would be worth $ 720. joyent went back on its word to offer the lifetime service “as long as we exist, ” but that’s not the only issue here. the real issue is that the customers felt like investors, even if they didn’t have a formal investment relationship. joyent has gone from a small hosting company to one of the big names in cloud computing and just closed $ 85 million round of funding last year. the people who helped them get to that point by putting up cash feel like they’re being left out in the cold .
back in 2006, cloud computing company joyent offered a lifetime subscription to bundle of hosting services for a one time fee of $ 500. now, according to an e - mail sent to customers, joyent is pulling the plug on those lifetime accounts. customers are predictably upset, but not for the reasons you might expect .
i asked joyent for comment and their representative pointed me to a forum post by hoffman, who is now cto of joyent. “it’s ironic that our biggest advocates are the ones most affected by this and i know many of you are disappointed in me, ” he wrote. and: “we’re only here because of the initial community that trusted us, and i’m genuinely grateful for the support. i’m sorry that i’ve lost that trust and i’ve upset you. you have a right to be upset. ”
making the decision to discontinue the service was extremely difficult. it was driven by some simple things: the hardware is simply old (6 - 8 years old), it’s failing, there isn’t an upgrade path from it, there’s more than many of you likely realize and oddly enough it’s more expensive with time (while not being used much). the rest of the joyent’s business has been paying for that, and i can’t make the argument as to why it can continue .
what lessons can be learned from this? instapaper creator marco arment writes: “anyone who bought this should be annoyed, but buyers should also blame themselves for casting insufficient skepticism on the deal in the first place. nothing in this business is ever truly ‘unlimited’, and ‘lifetime’ never means your lifetime. ” (instapaper sells a mobile app for a one time fee, but also runs ads on the web version to make money. )
but again, the real issue isn’t the money. the users got their money’s worth. it’s the fact that they were used as investors and are now being left out in the cold. companies eying kickstarter and other alternative ways of raising money should look at this situation and be careful what they promise or risk alienating the very supporters that got you off the ground. and customers should be wary of investing in for - profit companies that will only offer cheap, commodity services as a pay off .
locking in long - term customers could mean a steady source of revenue. but at a start - up, very little is steady .
for a consumer, there' s nothing like a lifetime guarantee - - until you find that the company has gone out of business and you have a problem. but there is something worse: a lifetime guarantee - - until it' s revoked .
that' s what one tech company decided to do recently and the aftermath wasn' t pretty .
and then the dark rain of customer kickback began. the more understanding customers complained about the mass email the company had sent, with comments like ,
i really hate that you chose an approach that showed us we were never more than customers, and suckers at that .
others ratcheted up the displeasure, saying that being offered fewer than 80 days to move to some other service was an unreasonably short amount of time and others demanding an immediate refund. (according to joyent' s pr agency the company
is not currently commenting on the end of life decision [ but ] will be making a statement in the next week or so .
)
making the decision to discontinue the service was extremely difficult. it was driven by some simple things: the hardware is simply old (6 - 8 years old), it' s failing, there isn' t an upgrade path from it, there' s more than many of you likely realize and oddly enough it' s more expensive with time (while not being used much). the rest of the joyent' s business has been paying for that, and i can' t make the argument as to why it can continue .
it' s fine to offer something like lifetime service or guarantees, but be sure that your business can actually afford to provide them. if not, you' re lying to customers, and that' s never a good idea .
there is little you can offer customers if you can' t keep your word. everything rides on that .
everything has its price. if customers fund your start - up, then don' t assume you can back out when things are inconvenient. pretend they are venture capitalists and treat them with the same respect - - because, after all, they are and you owe it .
to be fair, conditions change and sometimes you might find that you can literally no longer provide what you had wanted to. if you do need to change a long - standing expectation for more than just convenience or the desire to pull in a few extra dollars, bring customers into the process and get them to help fashion a resolution. people are far more understanding (and less vengeful) if they feel like you' re addressing their concerns .
update on 8 / 30: joyent just announced that it will extend its lifetime service offer to customers who had originally paid for it. a predictable move just late enough to make people suspicious going forward .
cloud computing company joyent informed customers this week that a
lifetime
web hosting offer that it promised more than six years ago would be coming to the end of its life this fall .
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 ,
joyent officials informed select customers, according to an email user ken mckinney posted on his google + profile. similar letters were posted by other joyent customers, all noting that users receiving the email were
one of the few customer still on our early product .
as consolation, joyent is offering customers the free use of one of the company' s smartmachines for one year. that wasn' t enough for user nick carroll, who posted on his blog that
joyent conned me with a lifetime hosting deal .
lifetime means a lifetime ,
said member odinsdream .
in describing the end - of - life announcement on the joyent community forum, joyent cto jason hoffman apologized, saying that the company' s business has changed and the hardware to support the web hosting was
too old ,
is not worth replacing and is costing the rest of the business money .
i' m sorry that i' ve lost that trust and i' ve upset you. you have a right to be upset. this was a tough decision with some nuance to it and none of this is lost on me ,
hoffman wrote. he adds ,
it' s ironic that our biggest advocates are the ones most affected by this ,
but overall, he says ,
i can' t make the argument as to why it can continue .
joyent offers a series of high - performance cloud computing, analytics, storage and networking features and is one of a crop of infrastructure - as - a - service (iaas) companies looking to gain market share in the industry. earlier this year, joyent announced a new round of $ 85 million in venture capital funding .
others didn' t seem as surprised by the news. responding on mckinney' s google + post of the news from joyent, another user, mike greenberg, noted ,
are you surprised that' lifetime' was just marketing? such claims should always be taken with a grain of salt .
network world staff writer brandon butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. he can be reached at bbutler @ urltoken and found on twitter at @ bbutlernww .
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a place where you could host a website. it was an experiment in venture funding, a means of bootstrapping a much larger company .
i' m not disgruntled or anything ,
says david foltz, a user experience architect who used the service to host personal projects. but he does point out that joyent is apparently still thriving, in part of because of the
investments
from him and others .
i knew fully well... that one day it wouldn’t be possible to support lifetime subscriptions anymore, and i knew, when the day came that it was no longer possible, i would step back in and take care of those people, ” allen told gigaom at the time .
foltz thinks a classier move by joyent would have been to fully refund all of its customers back in 2012 .
that would have been more appropriate thing for a company with deep pockets like joyent to do ,
he says .
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update march 31, 2014: the march 14th date came and went without much happening. the servers seemed to still be up, thanks to jacques. but then sometime in the last few days (maybe the 28th), the remaining servers finally went dark. throughout all that time, before and after the 14th, there was never a notice from dean allen about the pending shutdown. there were only two ways you could have found out about the shutdown: 1) you tried to visit the forums and saw the announcement, or 2) you happened to see it mentioned on twitter .
speaking of twitter, there are now loads of messages from those just now finding out that their websites are gone and their email no longer works .
throughout all of this, jacques marneweck has been a saint, and he' s doing what he can to recover whatever data he can for those who hadn' t migrated off in time (mainly because they had no idea). there' s a quickly - growing list of folks hoping that their data can be recovered over on the kaizen garden forums .
what began in mid - 2012 as an exciting challenge fuelled by good intentions and lean resources quickly turned into a cleanup project with almost no resources .
for those who wish to know, details of what went wrong will be made available once shutdown operations have completed .
you can still read the details below, although any links to the forums are no longer working. for discussion, there' s still a post at hacker news open, and also the ex - joyeurs google group .
the one employee that was actually doing any work, jacques, is no longer being paid. i believe he' s since taken a new job, but will occasionally pop in to try and help keep servers online .
the @ txd twitter handle hasn' t been updated since august of last year .
the @ textdrivestatus twitter handle has been a bit more active, but most recently from jacques' attempts to revive servers. again, without being paid .
his own twitter handle, @ textism, hasn' t been updated since june of last year .
added: the forum banner text
hey. nothing will be deleted or shut down until migration is complete .
was removed sometime around feb. 17th .
at this point, it is safe to assume that no one is handling incoming support issues, and as of yet, there is no one else to take over keeping things running .
there' s also an
ex - joyeurs
google group that sprung up when we were initially getting the boot from joyent .
@ davidspeed no clue. still waiting for an answer on that from dean .
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it was a fairly sad demise for a community project that was created with the best intentions over a decade ago, offering a lifetime of hosting to small time venture capitalists attracted to the fairly unorthodox start up mentality. i was into it from the start, i loved the chat on the forums and being part of something different than what i was used to with traditional hosting. we all felt a bit special, part of a larger picture, kind of a digital community for free thinking developers .
github is home to over 28 million developers working together to host and review code, manage projects, and build software together .
if nothing happens, download the github extension for visual studio and try again .
recompile all coffee script code (unit tests + mocks) in test / unit / .
recompile all less files in app / less / and create css files in app / css / .
capture chrome canary, start watching all the source files and run unit tests on change .
create build / package - *. zip / package, ready for uploading to chrome web store .
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you signed out in another tab or window. reload to refresh your session .
i requested that they honor the refund offer (as i' d already started migrating away, and as they' ve destroyed any remaining trust i had in them .) i just received the reply :
so, no, we can' t get our refunds and get the f out. i' m deeply unhappy with how they' ve handled this, start to end. (i too failed to receive any of the mass mail - outs. )
based on the history of the last 8 years, i have to assume that this is purely based on dean allen having been out of the picture for years, but now feeling some sense of duty to try to straighten things out based on his involvement in the original pitches way back when .
i' m wondering this as well. but the bigger question on my mind is whether i want to stay with them. i am almost finished migrating my data off of the hosts and onto google apps. i' m not going to undo what i just did, so i don' t see any reason to keep my lifetime accounts .
someone please correct me if i am wrong, but by relaunching as a separate company from joyent, it opens up the ability to truly shut down the service and avoid all of the lawsuits .
perhaps i am too cynical, but i see no other reason to jump through all of these hoops and separate .
i don' t think this was ever about joyent wanting to escape their lifetime hosting obligation. it was more about them not wanting to be in the shared hosting business - they don' t want to do that work. they still don' t want to be in that business, but they old founder has offered to come back and do it. all it will cost them is a little money, which is not so much when they think of all the damage this publicity could cause their business in years to come .
sure, but all it was really costing them in the first place was infrastructure and support costs .
this is one of my main concerns too. what' s the business plan here? how can i trust
lifetime
will mean something more than a year or two? as much as i appreciate dean stepping in, it may be too late .
obviously they will have to build a real business. they will have the incentive to do it this way though .
fair enough, but it seems like it would be hard to build a shared hosting business even without having to support a bunch of non - paying customers from day 1 .
i think you are being too cynical. imho, i don' t think the lawsuits were a serious threat or a factor in this decision. they (obviously) believe they have the right to shut down the service regardless of who owns it .
i already finished migrating off of my td lifetime account and onto webfaction. i don' t see why i should put my sites back on td. so i guess my td lifetime account is a spare, for now. i' m sort of glad to hear they' re doing the right thing, but they did it the wrong way .
i wonder what this means to the 5 - year hosting or full refund offer given to lifetime account holders .
it means those offers have been withdrawn. they are no longer an available option. (i just heard back from support. )
been withdrawn - which is a really crappy thing to do to the people who had already accepted that offer .
while i would like to beleive that they will fix all the problems, my previouse experience with joyent tells me that this may be an attempt to try to get away from the a lawsuit .
i posted a coment here two weeks ago [ 1 ] and i received dozens of responses - if anyone would like to join the class action to ensure our rights are not lost please conact me. i am not really interested in lawyers - i hope we can work something out .
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 .
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 .
for updates and resources click here [ the page linked by the op ] .
i wish i had received this email, i think i missed out on one of the migrations at some point and i dropped off the list, but i re - added myself now .
it really makes me feel happy to see dean to come out of the woodwork and handle this. i' m sure there' s a million things he' d rather do than be involved in web hosting anymore, but he obviously felt some obligation to all of us who believed in his vision 8 years ago, and that more than makes up for a thousand what' d - you - expect - from - shared - hosting - you - idiot comments on hn and elsewhere .
the lifetime package subscribers (and the community at large) were up in arms about it. here' s the earlier yc thread :
iirc it was originally a shared web host. i think they also had a gimmicky lifetime subscription if you pre - paid for a year' s worth of service .
google' s really good for those sorts of questions. but yes, they were a shared hosting provider that was one of the early leaders in supporting rails application deployment .
we' re in the process of moving radar to the new oreilly. com .
clearly, this signals the beginning of the ruby - on - rails mania reaching the financial markets! next year: 37signals ‘ ipo pops 300 points on its first day….
joyent was founded in 2004 under the name textdrive by the canadian typographer , art director , designer , writer and programmer dean allen , the creator of textile markup , who was looking to create an ideal hosting environment for the content management system he was developing , textpattern . textdrive was incorporated in california in may 2004 with allen as chief executive officer and jason hoffman as president and chief operating officer . textdrive was positioned as " a hosting company run by and for people who love publishing on the web . " 
joyent was founded in 2004 under the name textdrive by the canadian typographer, art director, designer, writer and programmer dean allen, the creator of textile markup, who was looking to create an ideal hosting environment for the content management system he was developing, textpattern. textdrive was incorporated in california in may 2004 with allen as chief executive officer and jason hoffman as president and chief operating officer. textdrive was positioned as " a hosting company run by and for people who love publishing on the web. "
joyent was founded in 2004 under the name textdrive by the canadian typographer, art director, designer, writer and programmer dean allen, the creator of textile markup, who was looking to create an ideal hosting environment for the content management system he was developing, textpattern. textdrive was incorporated in california in may 2004 with allen as chief executive officer and jason hoffman as president and chief operating officer. textdrive was positioned as " a hosting company run by and for people who love publishing on the web. "