R.I.P.  textdrive.com

Up until recently, I had a little Wordpress blog that I hosted using a sevice called Textdrive. Textdrive was a nice, simple Unix-based hosting solution that, prior to Joyent’s purchase of the company, provided great value for $15/mo. But sometime about a week ago, the lights went dark. At this point I should mention that this was no longer Joyent’s company. While Joyent seems to be focusing on major cloud services, the Textdrive of late was a reboot of the original shared-hosting provider, catering to the low-end.

The bankruptcy of a startup is not unusual, especially one catering to the low-margin side of a line of business, but what is unusual is how the company managed to shut down without even emailing any of its customers. I literally found out about the shutdown by attempting (and failing) to contact my server, only days after it had apparently been wiped clean. Apparently a notice had been posted to their support forums, which is a bizarre substitute for notifying one’s customer base. I can’t imagine what the explanation for all of this is, but it will be interesting to see how it turns out.

An amusing side note is that had I been an up-to-date reader of Wired Magazine, I might have read this article about how my hosting provider had gone out of business. And had I done so, I would have known a full month before someone came in and shut off the lights.