Here is a company with a history of making tall claims and then doing an 180. How is pointing that out a red herring?
> Besides, as far as I understand, Textdrive is in the process of being relaunched, honoring all the lifetime plans.
From what I know of the story, if they do honor lifetime plans, it isn't out of the goodness of their hearts. They had every intention of flipping the lifetime planholders, and they did, and what they are doing now is damage control.
> Here is a company with a history of making tall claims and then doing an 180. How is pointing that out a red herring?
That isn't particularly relevant to service quality and stability, is it? Maybe it's just me, but I try not to pay much attention to PR bullshit, since they have to make bold claims in order to succeed.
p.s. that their blog was down for the last three hours is somewhat ironic, though.
> Here is a company with a history of making tall claims and then doing a 180. How is pointing that out a red herring?
>> That isn't particularly relevant to service quality and stability, is it?
The claim being made is unlike Amazon, they won't let reddit down. It's relevant to point out these guys have made tall claims in the past and failed to deliver. I won't do business with someone who let's sales swindle customers. Even if the engineering is awesome, there is no guarantee sales didn't sell you something they couldn't deliver.
As far as service quality and stability goes, the only way to evaluate it is to actually switch.
> Maybe it's just me, but I try not to pay much attention to PR bullshit, since they have to make bold claims in order to succeed.
It's possible to do PR without bullshitting. You can always publish your actual numbers viz. number of customers, downtime history, avg issue resolution time. If you are resorting to bullshit, that means you don't have actual goodies.
The whole lifetime plan debacle was a really big blunder from PR standpoint, but I wouldn't go as far as to call it a rip-off. Deal that started in 2004-2006 and lasted through to 2012 is 6 to 8 years worth of hosting. As far as I understand, they also offer one more year of free hosting as a compensation, which makes it 7 to 9 years. 7 to 9 years of hosting for $500 is okay in my books.
Of course, that doesn't make their PR blunder look any better, they should've just swallowed the costs, but I don't 'fundamentally distrust' them based solely on this case.
> Deal that started in 2004-2006 and lasted through to 2012 is 6 to 8 years worth of hosting. As far as I understand, they also offer one more year of free hosting as a compensation.
You might have to excuse some here who actually understand lifetime and unlimited to mean more than 6 to 8 years.
> but I don't 'fundamentally distrust' them based solely on this case.
> > Here is a company with a history of making tall claims and then doing an 180. How is pointing that out a red herring?
> That isn't particularly relevant to service quality and stability, is it?
Not from a technical aspect, no. But it is a very important consideration when looking into any service level agreement that they offer to back up the technical claims. If something goes wrong, will they walk away from the promises made in such an SLA as easily as they thought they could walk away from the lifetime accounts? Unlikely I'm sure, but certainly not impossible and the lifetime thing sets a precedent that is difficult to completely ignore especially if you are talking about the sort of money Reddit must spend on hosting related matters.
Well when you make a decision to use a third party, typically the ethics and makeup of that party are evaluated. You can ignore it at your own peril. But IMO it's not very wise.
Here is a company with a history of making tall claims and then doing an 180. How is pointing that out a red herring?
> Besides, as far as I understand, Textdrive is in the process of being relaunched, honoring all the lifetime plans.
From what I know of the story, if they do honor lifetime plans, it isn't out of the goodness of their hearts. They had every intention of flipping the lifetime planholders, and they did, and what they are doing now is damage control.