New Year Server Migration

Here’s a bit of fun for the New Year, migrating my professional and personal blogs over to a new Server.

Back in the early 2000s  a small startup called TextDrive appeared online offering lifetime hosting for $200, lifetime being as long as the company existed.

I’ve always been a bit on the optimistic side when it comes to tech, especially Californian startups, so along with a few hundred others I brought into the idea and got myself a lifetime hosting account. Joyent then purchased TextDrive to give it’s online app suite a hosting element as it moved towards a cloud based stable of products.

Joyent honoured the lifetime accounts and even came up with a free suite of Ruby on Rails products aimed at the small business, they actually worked too. Everything was great for a few years, I enjoyed being part of the set up and the Joyent CEO even arranged a meetup when I visited San Francisco on holiday, that’s the spirit.

We all knew that sooner or later the lifetime hosting for the old TextDrive customers would come to an end, and that time came at the end in the Autumn of 2012. Joyent offered a deal for it’s cloud infrastructure but it wasn’t the lifetime style ethos we’d signed up for, many where unhappy at the loss of something a bit more that just a lifetime hosting account.

In October 2012 Dean Allen returned from self imposed exile in France to releaunch TextDrive, making use of  Joyent’s infrastructure. So now everyone seems happy, I myself spent the New Year moving my websites across to my new home. Happy days.