Welcome

[Joel Dueck]

I didn't start this as a place to bitch, although I feel like doing that right now. 

But while we're waiting for some kind of official explanation, it looks like there's a 98% chance that I have only two months to move several websites and DNS over to a new provider.

I don't want to migrate twice if possible, which I'd probably have to do if I used Joyent's 512MB server free for one year ($275 a year after that, no thank you).

So I set this up now as a way to jump start the conversation about where we migrate to from here. It's not fair to Joyent to do that on their own message board, and I'm not sure I have faith anymore that they'd allow it to continue for any length of time.

Finally let me just say to all the lifetimers: I think I speak for most of us when I say it's been awesome to be a part of this TextDrive/Joyent community for so long. I hope the ties can remain strong during this exodus, as messy as it may be.

[Reid Stott]

Back when One was a constant tale of despair, I moved my business domain away to Media Temple's Grid Service. I've been relatively happy with them since, at $20 a month. And I can easily add my personal domains to the existing account for no additional cost, so I imagine that's the direction I'm going to take. Unless there's is some type of reconsideration by Jason & Co. (which I think is doubtful).

[Will Vowels]

Ugh.  Well, thanks for starting this.  I can't believe I now have to find $20+ a month and complete migration of all my websites during the first month of the semester. 

I'm still in the "shocked" stage so I haven't had time to look into other solutions.  Is the grid service roughly equivalent to shared hosting?

Will

[Mark James Adams]

I don't mind migrating. Services change all the time, but spec'ing out a 512MB smart machine is more than twice the price of what I was paying for shared. So I will be looking elsewhere.

My needs are basic. Email that gets forwarded, a few php + static HTML sites, and 1 Ruby app.

[Mark James Adams]

I'll also add for the record (you might not know this) that I'm not a lifetime customer. But I'm sure shocked on everyone else'e behalf.

[David Ramos]

Looking here for a place to move very basic PHP/MySql client sites; static (Jekyll-based) personal sites; and a few more complex sites for nonprofit organizations that I'm involved with. One of the nonprofit sites, for an organization that's entirely volunteer-run, operates on Django. Affordable Django hosting presents a challenge.

I've had reasonable experiences with MediaTemple's basic shared services for static or PHP sites. They seem perfectly good. Services are a little basic, though.

I'm currently looking at Dreamhost, which offers free hosting for nonprofits that can show an IRS exemption letter. They support Django.

For my static sites, I might move to Gandi.net, who I've come to trust absolutely with domain registrations. They've got a low-price "simple hosting" product - cloud-like, but on the order of $5/month and up. They've also just opened a Baltimore datacenter.

[6sigma]

Years ago one of vendors crowed about a lifetime warranty. Well aware of the rapid demise of technology companies in those years, we asked, "your lifetime or mine?" I guess we now know what lifetime means to Joyent.

To begin the research required for a new host, I offer the following:

1. My needs are only for personal, small volume hosting. I'll be moving all email to Google.
2. Years ago, hosting names like Pair, Dreamhost, Media Temple, etc. were on the radar, but I have no current knowledge about any of them.
3. As a user of Textpattern, I'll be interested in what some of those guys suggest.

[6sigma]

Hey, Joel, thanks for firing this up. Maybe we'll stumble into a group rate from one of Joyent's competitors!

[J Aaron Farr]

I'm thinking of just picking up an Amazon micro EC2 instance. I still want to be able to ssh into the box and run pretty much anything I want. My concern with Amazon is that there's work I'd have to do on my own and an instance could go down, so I'll have to make sure everything is properly backed up. The same goes for any other cloud hosting service.

Personally, I've had less than stellar experiences with MediaTemple and Dreamhost. Pair was pretty good, but I still think I'm just going to grab a cloud instance.

[David Ramos]

Correction: MediaLayer. Not MediaTemple. I've inherited an organization's shared MT site and want out as soon as possible.

[Will Vowels]

I've considered the EC2 instance route, but I'd be lost without a virtualmin instance, and frankly, I don't have the time to set everything up for my relatively boring (Wordpress and PhP sites) needs.

[Joel Dueck]

At first I thought yeah, it'd be cool if some other hosting company took advantage of this but I'd want to know their hosting and service are sound. If something like that does pop up, let's check them out as rigourously as possible.

[Mark James Adams]

US$.03/hour isn't bad for a 512GB RAM, 15GB storage machine. It's just overkill for shared hosting needs.

[Trevor Johns]

Joel,

Thanks for setting this up.

For those who are looking for migration options...

I'm tempted to move to using GitHub pages + Jekyll for my static personal site, App Engine + JRuby for anything dynamic... and probably move back to Google Apps for email.

That said, I'll be watching closely to see if anybody finds any other good solutions.

[Stephen Austin]

Trevor, where where you thinking of hosting Google Apps?

[Will Vowels]

Yep, it's real:

Will Vowels, Aug 16 10:23 (PDT):

So, "lifetime" is officially dead? And this is a real company policy, not an error? You're officially not going to offer what we agreed upon when I gave you a bunch of money earlier?

Hi Will

As often happens in the software business, vendors “end of life” older platforms and migrate customers to new versions or platforms. The service you purchased a “lifetime subscription” to will no longer be supported or available from Joyent. On the other hand, we appreciate and value your business as an early customers. As such, we have created special offers specifically for you to make this transition as easy as possible. Details and promo codes were provided to you in the email.

Thanks,

------------------ 

Peter Yorke

Senior Solutions Architect

JoyentCloud.com

[Trevor Johns]

Stephen,

Google Apps is a cloud-based service from Google, it doesn't need to be hosted anywhere (other than Google's datacenters). It's free for up to 10 users.

http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/pricing.html

They'll even do basic DNS hosting if you're only using Google services on your domain, though I still recommend hosting DNS somewhere else for flexibility. I've had good experiences with both PairNIC and DynDNS.

(Disclaimer: For those who don't know, I do work for Google.)

[Stephen Austin]

What's galling about this is that we weren't "early customers" - we provided considerable start-up funding for the company. Now they've decided we were just customers after all.

[Reid Stott]

Interesting that they now seem to be saying it's the "lifetime" of a particular software platform. Two years ago, when I was facing brain surgery, I emailed Jason to ask if the "lifetime" accounts were for the lifetime of the individual, or the lifetime of Joyent. He replied that it was the lifetime of Joyent.

[Reid Stott]

Well, to provide some perspective, we 200 original VC's provided $40,000 of investment. In january of this year, Joyent got an $85 million investment from two companies. We're now chicken feed.

[Phil Gyford]

They sent me *exactly* the same response to my reply - they're just shovelling out canned emails to fob us off now. And still no actual "sorry" or "I apologise"!

[6sigma]

 And still no actual "sorry" or "I apologise"! ------>>>>They're not & they won't.

Let's find a solid hosting company who wants us!

[Stephen Austin]

By the same token Reid, it would be a negligible cost to Joyent to honour their original commitment to us all. When I forked over money to them, I didn't feel that I was buying something, but rather buying in to something. This convenient redefinition of us as mere prepaying customers is insulting. I'm extremely disappointed in Jason.

[Jared Dunn]

Ugh, what a drag. I just finished an incredibly belated (and tricky) migration off of one of the old FreeBSD servers (Nelson) this Spring, and now they decide to phase out the service I've migrated to, with very little lead time? Classy. Honestly, I've been expecting this email or something like it for years. Part of me wants to be mad on principle, but when I step back a bit, I feel like I got my money's worth over the length of the deal, and want to be rid of them and their lousy support and laughable customer relations.  However, I wanted to to it on my own terms and in my own time, instead of being pushed. That was too much to ask, I guess.

[Mike Hostetler]

I'm a Three Martini Lunch customer. I've been underwelmed by my Shared Joyent account for a while, but it serviced my needs. I generally didn't complain because it was service for life!

I did put up a new WordPress site on there in mid-June and the performance was painful and WP SuperCache or my usual tricks didn't fix the problem. I filled out a ticket because maybe someone had a runaway process on the server. The response I got back was "On the Shared host that is pretty quick. In order to get faster times you would have to move to a SmartMachine that has dedicated RAM, CPU and disk." Should have seen that as a sign that this is coming.

[slabanosa]

I'm so pissed right now I can't post, or read 

thanks Joel for firing this up

need to sleep on it, it was a great ride with Jason but that slap in my face no.

[gras]

My feelings exactly!  Nice to re-unite with TxD-friends, but what an ugly reason to do so!!!

[Rudolf Ammann]

Thanks for setting this up, Joel!

[Will Vowels]

One thing that occurred to me is that somebody who's got a spare moment should email the Consumerist about this.  They'd just eat this story up, and likely get us additional profile.

Also, for those who may not make the link, I was "wanderfowl" on the Joyforums and on the place of Tweets.

[gras]

So I was looking thru old TxD e-mails and found this note I wrote to Dean & Jason in 2006.  (Sadly, until this morning I still felt about the same about Jason, et.al.):

Dean, Jason,

 

Hope all is well with you as you approach the first anniversary of TextJoy.  Based on the Joyent blog, it looks like you and the rest of the gang are still having fun.  That's great, keep at it!

 

It feels like it has been a while since I sent some money your way.  (You probably don't get a lot of emails like this, but I believe in putting my money where my heart is.  Since you guys are building things that work, I want to support that.)

 

I looked at Bingo, but I just don't use WebDAV, yet.  (Ditto for Strongspace, but I love both concepts.) 

 

But, I do host a bunch of stupid-simple websites that a handful of people visit, all using TextPattern.  (I am working on putting up a RoR application, but I need to figure out the lighttpd setup first.)  So, that seems to be the place in which to invest.

 

Here is my thought.  I propose to Un-Crossgrade (upgrade to a full Mixed Grill).  A grunch of months ago I sent you $199 and received the Strongspace and Joyent parts of a MG.  Now, I'd like to send you $300 for the TextDrive part. 

 

If this works for you, charge my credit card (Visa that ends 4088, expires 4/08) and bump up the allocation for gras on davie by the appropriate amounts.

 

Since I'm currently only using 400MB of my 4GB quota, this un-crossgrade should cost you nothing.  Therefore, I further propose that you take the $300 and spend a non-trivial percentage of it on burritos & beer for your TxD hosting team.

 

Have a great day!

 

gras.

[Alan Schussman]

Thanks for starting this up, Joel!

No fewer than twice today did I think to myself "Hey, somebody should put up a forum to talk about this Joyent disaster ... hey, I have some webspace and lots of bandwidth I'm no---DAMMIT."

[Alan Schussman]

So I registered textdrove.com in something resembling a fit of pique, and forwarded go.textdrove.com to this group. Maybe we can come up with something fun to do with the domain or something like it, huh?

[Jan Isley]

Hello all my fellow reprobates,

Reid, a little trivia; Long ago and far away in a Textdrive meeting, I allowed as how I heard about the VC200 offering from you.  And Dean said, "he will never pay another dime here".  Meaning that in a good way, of course.

When I worked at Mindspring, even with all of their resources available to me, I had a personal account at Pair.  There are so many things that Pair does right like few if any other hosting companies.  I closed my Pair account after starting at Textdrive.  I am probably going to move some if not all of my "people" to a Pair account.  I have all of my domains with PairNic.  They may cost a little more than Godaddy, but I do not feel like I need to take a shower after visiting their site.  Godaddy is just icky.

[Jan Isley]

A few years ago, I registered bejoyent.com.  I am now sort of regretting having signed the domain over to them when we parted company.

[Andrew Kember]

That is interesting, Reid. I remember not long after this started when one of the VCs passed away (I never knew who) and the then-management made an exception and passed his (or her) account to their heirs. The intention back then seemed to be that it was your life, but I guess that was also contingent upon the company being there in some form to provide a service! I'm sure we can (and will) argue about the language until the cows come home, but at the end of the day, I'm glad the surgery went well.

[Andrew Kember]

Hi J Aaron Farr,

If you sign up for Amazon as a first-time AWS user, you can get your micro instance free for a year, which is pretty cool. If you choose an EBS-backed AMI to run (like the Amazon-provided Ubuntu one) then backing up is as easy as clicking the EBS "disk" and selecting "Create snapshot." Automating that will require a little work.

Be aware that micro instances will allow you to burst CPU, but are not allowed to maintain constant high CPU loads. For that you'd need a small instance at least. The docs for micro instances are here. Depending on your usage, micro might be fine. A micro instance, with a 30GB disk backed up every day, will cost you about £12.50 ($20) a month, or - if you bought an instance reservation you could reduce that to the equivalent of £10 ($16) a month.

Full disclosure: I do some of this stuff for a living, these opinions are mine, not those of my employer. Prices are estimates.

I hope you have fun with it whichever way you decide to go!

[Ernest Bako]

HI Andrew, 

I looked at Amazon AWS - there are a few answers to basic questions, that so far I could not find an answer for:

- are there any Amazon offerings already provisioned with a LAMP stack?

- is there anything equivalent to a cPanel to make things easier to administer and keep track of?

- is there a comparatively easy way for the user to install PHP scripts, via an FTP application, like it is on a more traditional shared server environment?

I'll keep looking, I have a feeling AWS is here to stay for a long time :-)

[Andrew Kember]

Hi Ernest, I'll do my best to answer your questions as best as I can.

To start an Amazon EC2 instance, you choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

They are listed here:
https://aws.amazon.com/amis
I'm having a bit of trouble putting my fingers on a Ubuntu LAMP stack from my phone browser but I'll have a go later.

Control panels: If you install it, you can have it ;-) Seriously though, there might be an AMI built with Web hosting in mind, but I don't know of one.

Uploading files: The default way to access your instance is by ssh with an encryption key. The same key can be used to upload files using SFTP.

How much of this will be possible depends on your level of expertise and the amount of time you are able to devote to it. The good thing about AWS is that you can get stuck in and figure out if you like it - for free. Even if you want bigger kit that's not in the free tier, it'll only cost you pennies to try it out.

I hope that helps a bit, I'll try to link to a decent AMI when I get a chance.

[Alicson K]

Just want to say hello in this Welcome thread.. 'Haven't "seen" most of you in a looong time, and really glad to see your names on my screen again, though wish this reunion was under better circumstances ;)  Am a bit too worn by all of this at the moment to appropriately express how I feel about the whole thing; needless to say I am very, very disappointed and also embarrassed.  Heartened that I'm not all alone in this; we became a community going into all of this and hopefully some of our original ideals and spirit and trust in each other, at least, can continue past this.  Meanwhile, thanks for setting up this space.

[Michael Cutillo]

Glad this group is here.

I won't have any free time to start worrying about a migration (to wherever) until mid to late September (I work at a college and right now is the busiest time of my year)

Thanks.

On Thursday, August 16, 2012 12:10:01 PM UTC-4, Joel Dueck wrote:
> I didn't start this as a place to bitch, although I feel like doing that right now. 
>
>
> But while we're waiting for some kind of official explanation, it looks like there's a 98% chance that I have only two months to move several websites and DNS over to a new provider.
>
>
> I don't want to migrate twice if possible, which I'd probably have to do if I used Joyent's 512MB server free for one year ($275 a year after that, no thank you).
>
>
> So I set this up now as a way to jump start the conversation about where we migrate to from here. It's not fair to Joyent to do that on their own message board, and I'm not sure I have faith anymore that they'd allow it to continue for any length of time.
>
>
> Finally let me just say to all the lifetimers: I think I speak for most of us when I say it's been awesome to be a part of this TextDrive/Joyent community for so long. I hope the ties can remain strong during this exodus, as messy as it may be.

[jawill...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, August 16, 2012 11:10:01 AM UTC-5, Joel Dueck wrote:
> I didn't start this as a place to bitch, although I feel like doing that right now. 
>
>
> But while we're waiting for some kind of official explanation, it looks like there's a 98% chance that I have only two months to move several websites and DNS over to a new provider.
>
>
> I don't want to migrate twice if possible, which I'd probably have to do if I used Joyent's 512MB server free for one year ($275 a year after that, no thank you).
>
>
> So I set this up now as a way to jump start the conversation about where we migrate to from here. It's not fair to Joyent to do that on their own message board, and I'm not sure I have faith anymore that they'd allow it to continue for any length of time.
>
>
> Finally let me just say to all the lifetimers: I think I speak for most of us when I say it's been awesome to be a part of this TextDrive/Joyent community for so long. I hope the ties can remain strong during this exodus, as messy as it may be.

might as well join in and acknowledge i'm another about to be cast adrift from Joyent/TextDrive. I am checking here to see what are options others, more knowledgable than myself, are suggesting.

thanks for all of your posts.

[Walter Piovesan]

I am happy with what dean has proposed.  Textdrive 2.0 suits me fine.

heading out and back  to  the Motley BBq chuck wagon.

best of luck.

cheers