Seems like the lesson for you here is: never give free hosting, people feel terribly entitled once they have it and their negative feedback may cause trouble in your actual products.

I paid $400 for lifetime service via the vc2 drive sometime in mid 2005. I got about 2.5 years of usable service before I completely abandoned textdrive. An effective rate of $160/yr for really marginal shared hosting.

I currently pay ~$215/year for a linode account.

I will continue to pay for linode.

The hosting is not free. It was paid for in advance.

Paid in advance is still free on a month-to-month basis. That's what I meant.

Paying for a service forever in advance is a devious mis-alignment of incentives. The customer will feel that they are owed everything. The business of it won't work out.

As I said, the lesson is, don't give shit for free - even for an initial payment. Ongoing services need to be paid for in an ongoing manner.