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.
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.
Exactly. The founding story goes something like this: Dean Allen had built a CMS (TextPattern) and he, along with other TextPattern users, wanted a hosting provider that would support it in a no-hassle way. He couldn't find one that fit his needs, so decided to create his own; after discussing and rejecting formal VC methods, he turned instead to his userbase with "an opportunity to acquire a piece of TextDrive at its inception, and to benefit from its future success in perpetuity."
Jason Hoffman, Joyent's CTO, whose name appeared at the bottom of today's "sunset" emails, was there when all that happened.
So as an investor, you'd prefer that the company you invested in continued offering a loss-making service until they went into bankruptcy? Rather than allowing them to just shut it down and concentrate on more sustainable business offerings?
That strikes me as the kind of investor a company wouldn't want.
Great, you bootstrapped a company, and they used those funds to grow. And in return all you got was a shared hosting account that's lasted about 8 years. You should have gone with the options - that's where the real money for investors comes from.
And VCs know the vast majority of startups fail. Some spectacularly fail or succeed, some run out of funds, some pivot, some change direction, and some just grow into sustainable businesses. This is one of the latter.
Blame both founders for their lack of vision - in not seeing shared-hosting as a dead-end business model, which was clearly evident round abou 2006. But don't blame the business for making the right decision to close down a non-performing service.
I dispute your premise that the lifetime plans somehow threaten Joyent's existence as a going concern; if the infrastructure of the lifetime services is difficult to support within Joyent's current business, I'd prefer that they honour the spirit of their promise instead of pretending that they promised something different and hoping that lifetime customers go away.
And again, I'd suggest that you get working on that time machine, because your powers of 20/20 hindsight are truly remarkable.
You don't get it. TextDrive was founded and sold on a vision.
Imagine what will happen if in a few years Dalton decides to stick ads all over App.net and send threatening letters to developers in the name of "curating the user experience". That's where the righteous indignation is coming from.
Correct, I don't get it. You bought into a vision that clearly makes no sense today, but didn't make much sense back in 2004. The reward for that investment was a shared-hosting account, which has kept running for 8 years.
There seems to be a confusion about whether you lifers have paid up-front for a long term shared-hosting account or whether you are investors into the business. If you are investors, you should probably have taken options, rather than a free shared-hosting account.
"Imagine what will happen if in a few years Dalton decides to stick ads all over App.net and send threatening letters to developers in the name of "curating the user experience". That's where the righteous indignation is coming from."
Then I don't renew my $100 a year developer account and walk away. I'm not investing in the company, I'm paying for a service that's on offer. When I'm not happy with the service I decide to no longer spend any more money there.
Whether it makes sense or not is beside the point. How much value we got is beside the point (the quality was such shit I wrote it off a long time ago incidentally).
The point I was trying to impart to you is that this was not just slimy bottom-of-the-barrel shared hosting marketing. The promise really was made in good faith and should be honored.
And wrt to App.net, fine, you are a stoic Buddhist individual. But I guarantee you that if that happens, people will fucking crucify him.
That's the boilerplate that the support desk is sending out to everyone.
I suppose the question to ask is this: "Were you lying back in 2006 when you said the offer was good '[a]s long as we exist', or are you lying now? Or did you decide to renege on your promise somewhere in-between?"
You'll get the same boilerplate response, but it'll be on record.
In my case and theirs, I consider this partial refund ok because I have been using his service 8 years and now I will move my small sites to a cheaper host.
Well, thanks for all your recent wisdom. Now all you need to do is travel back in time to 2004 and warn everyone that backing Dean Allen's little cottage-industry hosting venture will end in tears.
There were actually a number of "VC" phases with TextDrive, starting with the "VC200" in 2004 that raised $40,000 from 200 pledges of $200 to acquire and set up the hardware--
That was followed by a number of upgrade offerings ("Mixed Grill", "3 Martini Lunch") in subsequent years, extending into the Joyent merger/acquisition, that required a larger lump-sum payment.
Their pitch on lifetime service? "How long is it good for? As long as we exist."
Now, you can argue in strictly financial terms that those initial customers (of whom I'm one) have probably got their money's worth, and that the hosting landscape has changed sufficiently that the lifetime products are peripheral to Joyent's main business. The counterargument is that Joyent not only acquired TextDrive's customers, but the goodwill surrounding Dean Allen's original venture, and has traded on that goodwill ever since. Clearly, they feel that's not worth much these days.
Furthermore, giving people who've had eight years of not having to think about hosting options just 80 days to migrate, with explicit notice that their servers will be shut down and wiped on October 31, strikes me as pretty cheap.
As far as getting one's money's worth, the "VC-like" pitching makes that odd. Obviously it wasn't an actual VC arrangement, but it had some similar aspects: you take a risk by giving $X now to buy a "lifetime account" with some startup that might be bankrupt next year. In return for helping to fund them and accepting that downside risk, your potential upside is that if they do succeed and exist long-term, you get what would in retrospect be below-market-priced service as a reward for your early support.
It doesn't make much sense to say that, hey, thanks for the "VC" investment when it was a risk to buy from us, but now that we're successful, you've gotten your money's worth.
I switched across to the Mixed Grill in May 2006 (right around when John Gruber quit Joyent to do Daring Fireball full-time, I remember). It cost $499USD.
Did I expect more than 6 years? Yeah, I took them at their word - "as long as we exist".
Their behavior here is embarrassing and labels them as not trustworthy in the future. Pacta sunt servanda. The other side ending up potentially getting the better end of the deal, a nowhere near certain thing here from a 2004-6 perspective where their customers took significant risk taking the deal, is not an equitable reason to terminate the services.
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.