It was, indeed, a very limited test promotion to some small subset of customers and I am still undecided on whether it makes sense to pursue or not.
Generally speaking, I dislike "lifetime" offers and there is some bad history with those being badly abused - specifically by cloud providers. Was it Joyent that dishonored the strongspace lifetime offers ?
Yes, Joyent was the one that totally screwed the pooch on that.
I had a few lifetime plans with them. One was with TextDrive, before the Joyent acquisition/merger and that was their shared hosting plan back when they were doing everything on FreeBSD. Then after the merger they did a sort of pre-VPS type plan where it was using Solaris Containers. Those were really cool little boxes.
I also had one of their Strongspace lifetime plans, and that still exists as Expandrive bought them and continues offering the lifetime plans.
Edit: oh, and for how it was ended, Joyent was purchased by Samsung (I think it was) and to get the lifetime stuff off the books they basically forced everyone onto their VPS-like solution but only for ~2 years I think it was. So everything disappeared.
Generally speaking, I dislike "lifetime" offers and there is some bad history with those being badly abused
Back when Sirius Satellite Radio started, it offered "lifetime" subscriptions. People eventually learned that Sirius meant the lifetime of the radio as long as it tied to the purchaser's account, not the human being.
Many people got Sirius with their new cars. When they started trading them in three or four years later, they learned that their "lifetime" subscription not only didn't go with them to their new car, but the buyer of their old car also didn't get the old subscription.
Today, it wouldn't be as big a deal because you can stream Sirius ($10/month), or some other radio service over the internet. But this was back before even RealPlayer, and the mass adoption of cell phones.
Honestly, when I'm buying backups, I want to be a paying customer; that aligns my providers incentives with mine. Being a will-never-pay-again customer means that they want to minimize the costs of serving me, and are happy to see me go. No thanks.
This is a great way of thinking about it. Same goes for "unlimited" plans: the more I use, the lower their profit margins. I'd rather agree on terms and pay for what I use.
I got the offer and really considered it as well! It was the fear of an acquisition that convinced me not to take the offer. I was a TextDrive customer before they were acquired by Joyent, I was a LastPass customer before they were acquired by LogMeIn, and it was CrashPlan's cancellation of CrashPlan for Home that drove me to find rsync.net.
None of those other companies are rsync.net, so it's not really fair of me to consider them when making this decision -- but it made me think it's safer to just pay you guys regularly for a good service. Worst case, I spend a little more over the life of my account, but that money is going to a company I really like, so it's not much of a downside.
I have two accounts in my name, one for me personally and one for work. I got the offer on behalf of my employer, and was like; what would this even mean for this account? I'm pretty sure I would take the offer had it been for my personal account.
It was, indeed, a very limited test promotion to some small subset of customers and I am still undecided on whether it makes sense to pursue or not.
Generally speaking, I dislike "lifetime" offers and there is some bad history with those being badly abused - specifically by cloud providers. Was it Joyent that dishonored the strongspace lifetime offers ?
I forget ...