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Joyent Drops Lifetime Account Holders
New submitter samnorsk writes "I've long been a lifetime account holder of an old textdrive (now Joyent) cloud hosting account. I remember purchasing the account back in college for a few hundred bucks when I really didn't have the money to spend. At the time, I thought that the opportunity to have a persistent lifetime shell / web hosting account would be valuable. This would be a resource I could fall back on no matter what my current situation was. Now, I just received an email stating that Joyent intends to shut down my lifetime account. Quoting: 'We appreciate and value you as one of Joyent's lifetime Shared Hosting customers. As this service is one of our earliest offerings, and has now run its course, your lifetime service will end on October 31, 2012.' They do offer a 512MB cloud machine for one year, but presumably if we don't take that, we're done. In any case, our lifetime commitment would still be dropped in one year if we take that offer. How is it fair or legal for a 'lifetime account' to end when it is no longer convenient for the company? For reference, this was the original offer. In it, they state: 'How long is it good for? As long as we exist.'"
From their terms of service at the time of the offer, remedies are limited to refund of the amount paid and disputes over $250 must be arbitrated. "Lifetime" is not defined but their offer clearly says "as long as we exist" and they do still exist. If it were me, I would go for the refund and be thankful for 6 years of free use.
"Copyright 2004–2006 TextDrive Inc. TextDrive is a trademark of Joyent Inc."
It looks to me like the agreement was with Joyent the whole time. At the very least they were a party to the agreement. Joyent still exists.
They are now offering a refund or 5 years of hosting. I'll probably take it and move on.
Wrong. People buy just the assets of companies and leave behind the debt and liabilities all the time to the original owners.
No, they don't. Barring a bankrupcy, you simply cannot just buy the assets w/o inheriting the liabilities. I'm sure a lot of people and companies would like thta to be true, but under the lawy, itt doesn't work like that at all.
Bingo. Wish I had mod points for you. His agreement was with Joyent. I do not believe the new owners have to honor that agreement as Joyent no longer exists.
Absolutely Not, the only way to get out of that agreement is a refund or bankruptcy, you can't just buy the assets when you buy a company, liabilities and commitments both are transferred to the purchasing company. Before the Rickets bought the Cubs the Cubs filed for Bankruptcy so that any liens from the Tribune could not follow the Cubs to their new owner. When Fiat bought Chrysler they still have to honor all commitments that were not wiped in the bankruptcy pensions, warranties, loans all were honored if the bankruptcy didn't release them from it. If the world worked the way you think it does I could get a loan from the bank for my LLC then sell the company to my brother for $1 but the debt would not follow and since it was an LLC I would not be personally held liable and my brother would get the pile of cash.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
Except Steam have already made it publicly known that they have a procedure in place to ensure you don't lose access to games in the event that they have to close doors.
As the GP said, only if the company is bankrupt, and then you won't be buying the company, just the assets. In this case the company was bought, so there was no bankruptcy and the liabilities went to the new owner.
1. Joyent isn't textdrive, i.e. textdrive doesn't exist anymore, so the lifetime obligation has been exhausted.
Given that the summary linked to the original offer...
We're pleased to announce a special offer that combines three great products in our family -- TextDrive, Strongspace and Joyent -- available for a one-time payment of just $499.
Want to try that again?
2. Whose lifetime? The service's, i.e. no shorter than its lifetime.
What they said was
As long as we exist.
The thing is, even though TextDrive, Inc. no longer exists, "three products in our family" and including two products other than TextDrive makes the offer explicitly from the parent company Joyent, Inc. The same company which still hosts the article author's site.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Not true at all. You can buy a company's assets and none of their liabilities. It's called a "bulk sale of assets". How this is done varies by state, but it's done all the time. Is it fair? That's another story and a problem for liability holders. It's also one of the problems with corporate law and how it's unevenly applied across jurisdictions.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
$500 for 6 years of service comes out to about $6.94 per month. That isn't a particularly good deal. In fact, it's actually pretty darn expensive when you put a pencil to it. Much cheaper than their current hosting plans, mind you, but compared with the competition, it's highway robbery. For comparison, two bucks more per month from Dreamhost (in two-year blocks) or nearly a buck less from HostGator (in three-year blocks) gets you unlimited web storage (versus 2 GB), unlimited monthly bandwidth (versus 20 GB), unlimited databases (versus 20), and unlimited hosted domains (versus 15).
No, this isn't $500 worth. It's maybe $150-200 worth at best.
For the kind of money they paid for the service, that's a good way to get such negative reviews that you quickly find yourself without customers.
Then again, so is dumping a large chunk of your customer base, so odds are, this company is desperate because they're struggling to pay the bills. I wouldn't trust them to host my lolcats site, much less anything that I cared about.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
For the last time...that 'coffee on the crotch' thing people hold up as the prime example of frivolous lawsuits was probably the most justified lawsuit this country has ever seen.
The woman had fucking third-degree burns throughout her crotch and thighs. A surgeon had to literally rebuild her labia and vagina. Hundreds of people had received second and third degree burns from McDonald's coffee in the years leading up to the suit, including instances when employees spilled the coffee on patrons. McDonald's specifically acknowledged even before that particular incident that the coffee was dangerously hot and unfit for consumption at the time of sale, yet still made a firm and specific corporate policy of setting every coffee maker to that temperature.
It was categorical, institutional recklessness that severely injured hundreds of people over more than a decade, but when one woman actually sues and wins over this everyone dismisses her as a cash-grabbing crackpot. That's what lawsuits are for; when some entity is fucking people over and won't respond to any other pleading or incentive.
Half of the 'frivolous' lawsuits out there are completely reasonable and proper grievances that corporations have sneakily re-framed as whiny bullshit. Because how dare the peons think there's an even playing field for them somewhere?! Courts are for corporations to get things done, not the people! Just because some jerk sues Dairy Queen over melted ice cream - and every comedian or 'human interest' journalist in the nation takes a crack at that moron - doesn't mean you can snidely dismiss every individual vs. corporate lawsuit without a second glance.