Current word on the street is that Joyent will not be reneging on their lifetime hosting contract; instead the original CEO of TextDrive is coming out of reclusion/retirement/what-have-you to spin TextDrive out from Joyent and continue honoring our contracts.

I’m fifty-fifty, assuming this all actually happens, on whether or not TextDrive will be a going concern in a year or two. Still, I guess it’s worth the gamble–free is free (once you get over the sunk cost fallacy), after all.

So: VPS plans on hold. I’ll keep riding this bronco, for now.

Seven years ago I got in on a sketchy-sounding “lifetime hosting” offer from a small company called TextDrive. TextDrive was soon after consumed by Joyent, who last Thursday demonstrated how sketchy the offer actually was. My lifetime hosting is being unilaterally revoked as of the end of October, and I need to migrate to a new host before then. (Moral of the story: Joyent’s word isn’t worth shit. Corollary: think twice before relying on node.js.)

I’m uncharacteristically taking this as an opportunity to grow, and have elected to try setting up my own little VPS instead of relying on others to manage a server on my behalf. I figure it’ll be good for a laugh and at least one night of squinting at command-line prompts–and I can always fall back to the other if my kung-fu ends up being too weak.

So: look forward to a transition to a horribly insecure, spam-riddled and hacked-to-hell server in the next month or so. I’ve mostly given up drinking while I continue trying to lose weight, but tonight I’ve cracked open a beer. One does not simply provision a VPS while sober.