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.
Ah, Joyent. I think they picked up StrongSpace as well… good thing I haven’t relied on that service for years.
I’ve been running a VPS (a Linode, to be precise) for a while now and am rather pleased overall. Good luck and have fun!
Joyent had Strongspace, but sold that part off to ExpanDrive a few years ago. I’ve never used it for much (it was another part of my “lifetime” hosting–the part that might actually stick around, as it turns out), but I haven’t had any problem with them.
I’m trying out DigitalOcean (they’re new and cheap), but I’ve heard nothing but good things about Linode. Excitement abounds!
The one trick with Linode is that they tend to have occasional… networking issues. ESPECIALLY in the Fremont datacenter. Yes, guess where my VPS is located. Sigh.
Seems to only happen a couple times per year, so there’s that.
Good luck with the migration! Let me know if I can help with anything.
I don’t know that there’s any web host that doesn’t have some trouble at times. I’m not sure where the line is that divides “sporadic trouble” from “OK this is ticking me off”, but a couple times a year (if a few hours or less) isn’t really a deal-breaker for me. After all, it’s not like I’m losing millions of dollars for every minute my blog is down.
Thanks for the offer, Daniel. I’m not rushing this (so don’t anticipate any calls tomorrow), but I may well take you up on that.
[…] into Joyent, and that Joyent had decided to unceremoniously dump its lifetime commitment back in August 2012. (Joyent is still scum, by the way, and should be avoided at all costs. You might be best avoiding […]