TextDrive

Infobox_Company
company_name = TextDrive, Inc.
company_
company_type = Private
foundation = California (2004)
location = California, USA
industry = Web hosting service
products = Web services
homepage = [http://www.textdrive.com/ www.textdrive.com]

TextDrive is a web hosting company offering shared hosting, managed hosting and dedicated servers, as well as web-based applications and consulting services.

History

TextDrive was founded in 2004 by Dean Allen, and was originally conceived as a managed hosting service for users of his Textpattern content-management system. In an unusual move, Allen offered lifetime hosting accounts, at a one-time price of USD$199, to the first two hundred customers in lieu of seeking venture capital; this initial group was dubbed the "VC 200". The scope of the company quickly moved beyond Textpattern hosting, however, and TextDrive has been a general-purpose hosting service for most of its history. Since the initial "VC 200", TextDrive has occasionally run additional lifetime offers, but has mostly offered hosting plans based on monthly subscription. The company also offers consulting services in the realm of web application infrastructure.

In August 2004, TextDrive became directly involved in the applications business with the launch of "Strongspace", a secure file storage and backup service offering a web-based interface in addition to SFTP access.

In November 2005, TextDrive merged with Joyent, developers of a web-based collaboration suite aimed at small businesses. The new venture soon offered a pair of combined lifetime plans, in the tradition of earlier "VC" offers, which included subscription to TextDrive's hosting, the Strongspace storage system and the Joyent application suite, and in October 2006 announced that its monthly plans would be restructured to include all three services.

In September 2006 the combined company launched another web-based storage service, "Bingo!", which offers more storage space than Strongspace but is limited to HTTP access via WebDAV.

Relationship with open-source software projects

Since early in its history, TextDrive has provided support to open source software projects; the company donates a portion of proceeds from each customer's hosting services to an open source project of the customer's choice, and has offered hosting services specifically tailored for developers of open source projects. The company also has had a stronger relationship with some specific projects (other than Textpattern, the project for which the company was founded):

* Ruby on Rails: TextDrive was among the first companies to support Rails on shared hosting accounts, and was officially endorsed as a Rails host by Rails' original developer, David Heinemeier Hansson [http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000321.html 1] . TextDrive has also offered consulting services on Rails development and deployment, including a "Scale with Rails" conference, employs several core Rails developers and hosts rubyonrails.com.
* Wordpress: TextDrive provided infrastructure and support for the deployment of WordPress.com, the official managed hosting service for Wordpress.

Relationship with Sun Microsystems

In 2006, the combined Joyent/TextDrive became a vocal supporter of hardware and operating systems from Sun Microsystems, offering VPS-like hosting plans, called "containers", built around Sun's Solaris operating system, and was featured in promotional materials from Sun [http://joyeur.com/2006/09/13/sun-launch-video 2] . The company also announced that it would be transitioning all of its older services and applications from Dell hardware and FreeBSD to Sun hardware and Solaris.

External link

* [http://www.textdrive.com/ TextDrive homepage]