We have been blindsided by an email from Joyent stating that their VC-backed “lifetime” accounts will be sunseted by their (very different) Joyent Cloud architecture. I’m not going to get into the minutiae of how corporate and insincere the email read, I’m going to focus on the broken promise.

The Joyent “lifetime” accounts represented venture capital backing by early TextDrive (TxD) users and was to be honored for the life of the company even after Joyent acquired TextDrive. I backed them more than one time, and across two different accounts (mine and my wife’s). In the end we had invested a fair bit into the company because we were aligned with TextDrive’s values. We had reservations about the Joyent acquisition, but in the end we were reassured nothing would change and the “lifetime” accounts would be honored by the same definition. Of course this reassurance caused more VC service backings that we had since stopped paying attention to. In the beginning there were so many rounds of backings, you could miss a set if you left the forums for a month or two. We missed a few seemingly ideal opportunities.

Thus VC backers naturally view these services as equity in the company. The misgiving comes in the form of dishonoring the agreement that caused the wave of VC backers to continue backing the startup after acquisition. “Lifetime” really meant “until our business model falls out of alignment” and then we must remove the tumor. Could Joyent have afforded the O&M to keep shared hosting around? I’d hope so, they seem like they are doing alright financially. But it’s a slap in the face to the people who helped get them there. Especially those who backed them multiple times.

One can argue nothing’s free (it wasn’t), and nothing is forever (it wasn’t), but generally equity doesn’t disappear without a trace like our “lifetime” plans did.

Instead, we were given a ONE YEAR voucher for their intro plan on Joyent Cloud, and DNS was curbed so we were pushed to pay Dyn or retreat back to our registrar. The starter plan offered a considerably smaller subset of what we had available on the VC plans, especially with the bigger backers. We personally used such a small amount of resources, but yet it’s the principle of how our investment was valuated in the end that has caused friction with the company.

Suffice to say, StrongSpace and ExpanDrive have confirmed the StrongSpace lifetime plan that is associated with the expiring Joyent “lifetime” shared hosting plans will still be honored. So it’s not all bad news.

Feeling forced out of shared hosting because Joyent Cloud is a wholly different architecture from what we need – we immediately closed that door and opened another.

We are now hosted at Media Temple Grid Service. We have zero complaints as their customer service and administration consoles are very capable.

There is a fairly lengthy thread on the subject here: Joyent ending “lifetime” hosting accounts

After considerable second-guessing - as one does with a project late in development - there are enough compelling reasons to move the minimum deployment target of our upcoming app to iOS 6.

Beta testing will likely continue on a minimum version of iOS 5 while the grand iOS 6 refactor is taking place. However, the shipping version will require iOS 6. We are looking at shipping in Fall as appropriate.

This weekend I migrated the existing website to Octopress. Primarily, Octopress was chosen because it generates static content, is Git-backed, has impressive code block and Gist handling, and writing content largely resembles Markdown.

This also opens up the door to posting articles and various tidbits, beyond the Feeder-derived RSS XML and jQuery driving the old sidebar for short-form news with primitive markup.

This clears the air to focus on iOS 6 work for the summer.