Morton Fox's journal

This is an update to End of a Lifetime from five years ago.

When TextDrive ended, I took up Joyent's offer for five years of Joyent Cloud hosting, which came in the form of a credit balance roughly equal to five years of hosting on a 512MB Joyent SmartMachine. Well, that credit balance finally ran out this month. Joyent's $22/month fee is actually rather steep nowadays for VPS hosting. After investigating a number of VPS providers, I opened a Linode account and set up a lowest-tier node there. It's $5/month for a Linode 1024 and I got the first 4 months free as a signup bonus. Then I moved my websites and domains over. I haven't done that in years, so it took a bit of research to find out how to set everything up but with the wealth of how-to articles and example configurations out there, it's actually easier now than it was the last time. And finally, I shut down and deleted my Joyent Cloud instance so they'll stop billing.

So with Joyent's extension, the TextDrive "lifetime" offer lasted 12 years. Even though it wasn't the lifetime that they originally promised, 12 years of hosting is a decent length of time for the money. Going forward though, I won't consider any more such deals unless they break even within a fairly short time.

I have a lifetime webhosting account at Textdrive. After Joyent acquired Textdrive, they put out the offer to migrate all Textdrive accounts to Joyent accounts on newer, faster servers. I believe that offer has been on the table since early 2008. As I now have time to take care of the migration, I opened a support ticket and asked them to initiate it. Well, I took a look at the new admin console this morning and saw that I now have 10 times the disk space and bandwidth quota at no additional cost. I'm really going to enjoy this! Well, okay, I have a lot of work to do to put this to use after doing the migration but all in due time.

Then this evening, while working on my tax return and fetching some information from Ameritrade, I noticed that my account had changed from "Izone" to "Apex". It's such a small change that I only noticed it when I took a close look at the logo in the top left corner after logging in. Puzzled, I shot an email to customer support asking about it. Turns out that they had closed their Izone segment and moved all accounts over to either regular Ameritrade or Ameritrade Apex. However, they're still keeping me on the lower Izone fee structure. So at no additional cost, I now get a bunch of trading tools, real-time data, and priority client service. (including a personal advisor, apparently. He called and left a message this morning.) I probably won't use most of those features since the way I've been managing money all this time has been just fine. What will be useful is Apex removes fees on tender offers and mandatory reorganizations. Some companies do that on occasion so I'll save a little money there.