Update: Joyent comes good with lifetime hosting – Long live TextDrive!

I was disappointed to have received the below email in my inbox from Joyent this morning. I feel as though I was conned twice when I paid for the Mixed Grill, and then the Three Martini Lunch, both offering lifetime hosting for as long as the company exists. They were both big upfront payments for hosting, and the offer at the time was used to kickstart the Joyent business without giving up shares for capital. What is worse is that I recommended Joyent to friends, colleagues, and clients over the years which converted to paying customers for them. I now have to find a service provider that I can trust. Heroku and AWS are at the top of the list.

By the way, the one year of Joyent Cloud hosting was a real kick in the teeth. I can go to AWS instead and make use of their free usage tier for a year.

Dear Nick Carroll,

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.

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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