TextDrive was incredible for hosting Textpattern (anyone else missing Textile?) which at the time was a nice and quite loved alternative to Wordpress.
Eventually it also became great for hosting Ruby and Ruby on Rails apps as well as Django apps at a time where other hosting companies struggled with it (outdated ruby versions, bad support for anything non-PHP). The people at TextDrive even helped a lot of us scale our apps.
Some early customers hold a grudge against the company because it had a strong community aspect and very openly shared ideas and plans for future features and products (some of which weren't delivered as is imho completely normal if you are open about your plans).
Tech being "fine/not fine" obviously is hard to argue about. I just wanted to add another pov.
The company has quite the history.
I have to disagree with your characterizations. The products changed much over the years, many things were tried, many failed. Most startups change their product significantly over time and it's hardly surprising that the business they are in now isn't one of the early iterations they tried and failed at.
I strongly believe that Jason is one of the best technologists on the planet. So there.
I'm sure he's a bright and likable guy, and from his resume I figure he must be an inspiring leader. But for me, being a great technologist is all about things actually working, about users actually getting served. Sure, one should fail a lot in the lab, and sure, startups should be trying enough things that some just don't have product/market fit. But that's very different to me than promising the moon and delivering stuff that doesn't actually work.
There were always those legacy customers from years before who had there stuff running on some boxes in an old datacenter that only a few of the original staff knew about, and required continuous care and attention. Ihere's a business lesson to learn there - if you sell a "lifetime" subscription for a product that will become obsolete, you'll pay a lifetime PR cost in the future when you can't continue with that product.
Coming from a pretty long Linux background, Solaris took some getting used to, but once I figured it out, it really was a better, more solid, better engineered solution. But Linux has a huge community - the people that loved Solaris are the old Unix graybeards, and that community wasn't growing.
Before my time, there were some debacles, such as a storage platform product that ended up losing data, but by the time I was there, they had learned the lessons, and I'll still say their core stack is still superior to any Linux based stack used in the datacenter today. It's been 4 years since I worked there.
In their shoes I think the lesson I would learn is "don't go back on a deal". They could have returned the money, transitioned people to another product, shifted people to a different vendor, or offered people the option of any of the three. I don't think it was initially a PR problem; it was bad behavior, unilaterally breaking a promise, that got them in hot water.
Seems like he considers s3 a marketing trick..
> ...the smartest thing we could’ve done was never let all the web 2.0 companies go away. We had everybody back then. It was probably the biggest tactical error, if you will, but the tech was fine.
The reason they lost those customers was that their tech was not fine. In the early days, Jason was posting dozens of posts a day to the TextDrive forum waxing on about how awesome the tech they were working on was, however at no point did it ever stabilize into something reliable. It was initially sold as being the first non-oversold shared hosting service, which implicitly promises stability, but in fact it was half the reliability of traditional shared hosting like Dreamhost at 10x the price.
Now it was true that they were bleeding edge, and so they got a lot of these companies on board, and even were the first "official Rails host" before any other shared hosting could handle Rails, and they had a lot of brand equity, which is how they managed to have this great early customer list. But it was all just based on hype and a compelling sales pitch from Jason. It really rubs me the wrong way how he has parlayed his mediocre-at-best technology execution into an image as a technology pioneer which he continues to use to leverage himself to new heights. The guy is a mediocre technologist, but a fantastic salesman.