> I know TextDrive and Joyent have
> treated me more than fairly in the
> past

agreed.

i feel a bit disappointed that i suggested that Joyent may have been intentionally deceptive. they have a lot more integrity than most other companies in my experience.

in hindsight i would have simply asked for an official statement to be made regarding the future status of the resource levels—since i’m not sure i would purchase a lifetime Accelerator if they were locked.

I don’t have any visibility into why it was left out – but I know TextDrive and Joyent have treated me more than fairly in the past with amazing upgrades to lifetime accounts at no additional cost. I have a tendency to think they would do the right thing if possible.

> If you have a lifetime account already,
> the price is less than one year of
> service. (If you don’t, it’s still less
> than 2 years of service.)
>
> This is a fantastic deal whether they
> bump up the levels over time or not.

Michael, i’m not irritated about the value of the deal. sure, i’d like resource levels to track and i do think it would be to Joyent’s benefit, but i’m not irritated about this.

i do however feel irritated knowing that the information that the resource levels were locked was very likely specifically and intentionally excluded from the description.

this behavior smacks of “big corp” marketing gimmicks.

this behavior is the opposite of transparency.

it is bad public relations. especially because most folks would assume the opposite.

it is corrosive to community because it engenders distrust.

it would be similar to if Sun silently starting selling hardware with NGE’s instead of Intel E1000g’s. people would be pissed.

This is a fantastic deal whether they bump up the levels over time or not.

upon further consideration, it contradicts hosting plans in general since every hosting plan i’ve ever heard of always has resource increases over time. that’s the nature of hosting. if the resources didn’t increase over time the hosting service would become obsolete and effectively useless.

if you do decide to keep the resources locked at a fixed level it would be better to drop the word “lifetime” from the title of the offer. because these accounts will not be usable for a lifetime. in fact purchasers would be lucky if they were usable for 10 years given the rate of change in the IT industry.

peace,
david

kchrist wrote ( http://forum.textdrive.com/viewtopic.php?pid=131828#p131828 ):
> FYI, for anyone interested, Daniel has
> informed me that while the lifetime
> shared accounts (MG, 3ML) track the
> services offered by Plus and Premier
> accounts (eg, upgrades to the Plus
> account are given to MG holders as
> well), lifetime Accelerators do not. A
> small Accelerator will always stay at
> the level you’re buying it at (256 MB
> RAM, etc), even as the smalls they
> offer for sale increase over time.

@ David Young: this really needs to be in the product description, otherwise it’s quite disingenuous (especially since every other lifetime deal contradicts this).

i also respectfully suggest that you reconsider this detail. how much money will you be saving by preventing lifetime accelerators from tracking the “S” and “M” resource levels? my guess is that the savings will be relatively insignificant and that it would be to Joyent’s benefit to let lifetime accelerators track the resource levels of the “S” and “M” accounts.

by allowing lifetime accelerators to track resource levels you will generate more value in the form of good will from the account holders than you will save by locking resource levels.

peace,
david

I spent some time trying to figure out how to migrate over from my existing shared Mixed Grill plan until I realized its a net-new proposition and I get to keep the old account. Amazing!

I’ve been on the lifetime account for awhile now (long enough for it to “pay for itself”) and I’ve been very happy with the service and support. That includes the nice little upgrades along the way, e.g. 100GiB Strongspace(!). That sort of attention to the customer is what makes this decision easy.