TextDrive

» see textdrive.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In 2004 a hosting company asked its future customers to buy the hardware first. Dean Allen and Jason Hoffman offered 200 subscriptions at $200 each and spent the resulting $40,000 racking the machines TextDrive would run on. Allen called the group the VC200, a joke at the expense of the venture capital he had not raised. He and Hoffman were subscribers one and two.

Allen had already given the web two things people used daily without knowing his name. Textile was a markup language for writers who did not want to learn HTML, which he described as a humane web text generator, and Textpattern was the content management system built around it. TextDrive was where both would live. Its customers were the writers and designers who made the independent web of that decade worth reading.

In November 2005 TextDrive merged with Joyent, a groupware company that had launched shortly before. Joyent had collaboration software and TextDrive had the machines to run it on. Hoffman became CTO of the combined company and steered it toward cloud computing, where it went on to host Twitter through the Fail Whale years. Allen was made president of Joyent Europe and left in 2007.

Then on 16 August 2012 Joyent emailed the lifetime account holders to say their accounts would end on 31 October. Those were the people who had paid for the hardware eight years earlier, and the agreement they had signed mentioned no expiry. The reaction was loud enough to reach people who had never been customers.

~ the dossier ~

~ the vc200 ~

What $200 bought in 2004 was shared hosting with no end date on it. The exact wording, which the surviving account holders quoted back at Joyent for years, was a question and an answer: how long is it good for? As long as we exist. Later rounds went out under names Allen plainly enjoyed writing, the Mixed Grill and the Three Martini Lunch.

Two hundred dollars in 2004 was not money I was going to hand to a hosting company. Everything I put online in those years sat on a free host, banner ad across the top, quota counted in megabytes, and permanence never entered the calculation. An account you paid for once and then kept was pitched at people already making a living writing on the web in English. In Turkish that was not yet a living anybody made.

~ taking it back ~

Allen came back for it. On 30 August 2012, two weeks after the Joyent email, he announced that TextDrive would be separated out as its own company and that the lifetime agreements would be honored. He ran it on Joyent infrastructure and believed it could be made to work.

It could not. What he had taken on was eight years of accumulated accounts sitting on hardware he did not own, against revenue that had been collected once in 2004 and spent in 2004. The lifetime customers were the most loyal group any host has ever had and also the only group guaranteed never to pay again.

On 3 March 2014 he wrote to them. The letter called the relaunch a cleanup project with almost no resources and said that after a year and a half of uphill battles and unimagined setbacks, the options to keep TextDrive growing had run out. The closing date was given as the 14th of March. The last line was Sorry to have let you down.

~ the memorial ~

textdrive.com still answers, rewritten in the past tense. The page lays the dates out in order and quotes the March 2014 letter in full. It also records that Allen died in London on 13 January 2018 at 51, and that Textile and Textpattern are both still in use. At the bottom it names the host paying for the memorial, a cooperative that gives you a shell and gets out of the way.

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