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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.
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