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Comment by blndcat | Hacker News Reader

In the end shared hosting with Joyent wasn't very good. It was slow, it was clunky and had an air of neglect. I have one site remaining on it I think. Most of my sites are on Linode.

What was worse was that Joyent changed directions, decided its then current customers weren't profitable enough (my guess shared hosting = higher per head tech support costs) and basically stagnated the service while it introduced new services. I think they did this a couple of times, and it has always made me relunctant to recommend them to friends (even ones looking for cloud services).

Sigh I hope StrongSpace will still honour the lifetime part.

BTW for readers who think lifetime account holders are being greedy, the point of the accounts was that when TextDrive/Joyent needed extra capital to expand, they offered lifetime accounts in return for quite a bit of cash up front. In part, they are where they are due to this clever bit of fund raising.

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Joyent will keep supporting their Strongspace customers [which we, ExpanDrive, provide the service for - Joyent provides the hardware for their lifetimers]

Thanks Jeff for clearing this up

I suspect this cuts right to the core of "why" Joyent would dump pretty low-overhead services and catch the flack over it. The hardware requirements to provide this shared hosting environment has plunged over the years; it's part of why I disagree with the "why did you EXPECT a lifetime deal" folks - because I always assumed that such a level of service would get cheaper and easier.

Except the one thing that doesn't get cheaper is the human power needed to administer the stuff and deal with the people. And as Joyent moves away from that sort of thing it becomes an unusual task and a drain on core business.

Which doesn't mean I think this is okay; the smart thing would have been to hand all of us lifetimers a lifetime bottom-tier slice. But I see why they'd want to be out of shared hosting.

The idea that the hosting would get cheaper over time is interesting. If you assume that the ongoing costs follow a Moore's Law type exponential curve (which may not be true, but seems like a decent rough approximation) then the total cost to provide a constant service for an infinite time is finite!

Computation will always require some energy though, so the cost will approach some nonzero constant. Still infinite.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle

The real issue is, to paraphrase a football player, "What do lifetime mean?" Is it the lifetime of the product (typical in consumer goods), or was it the consumer's lifetime (i.e.-until they died)? If it was the consumer's lifetime, if they had a site where someone died and another person was going to take over, would we then be upset if Joyent started charging the successor?

Lifetime typically means expected life of the product (see: lifetime warranties). Death is really, really complicated, so I can't imagine anybody would actually tie their products to a consumer's death.

If you look at the offer on the waybackmachine: http://web.archive.org/web/20060202181857/http://textdrive.c...

It has this Q&A item: How long is it good for? As long as we exist.

The footer states: a Joyent company

Nothing complicated, Joyent still exists. shrug

Yup, that's pretty cut and dry, and that's what I was looking for, so thanks. You guys that got hosed by this may have a breach of contract case if you'd like to take it that far.

The original product specified that it was good for "as long as we [Joyent] exist". NOT for as long as that product exists.

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