A lot has happened in the last two weeks, and the below message from Dean Allen was the outcome I was looking for after I was notified of the End of Life notice I had received earlier this month.
It looks like Joyent have provided those that bought into the Lifetime hosting deals another option, and that is to spin off the shared hosting services under the TextDrive name, and continue the lifetime hosting service with TextDrive. The TextDrive shared hosting services will be migrated to the Joyent Cloud. Of course some are speculating that the lifetime hosting terms (for as long as we exist) will transfer to the new entity, which may only exist for a short period of time, and thus cleanly bringing an end to the lifetime hosting commitment. I for one am championing the decision as I believe there is a sustainable business model for shared hosting services to be based on Joyent’s cloud infrastructure. Long live TextDrive!
Nick Carroll,
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.
Dean Allen
TextDrive