TextDrive was a hosting company run by and for people who love publishing on the web.

Dean Cameron Allen and Jason Hoffman co-founded it in May 2004.

Dean had already built Textile — a markup language that let writers format text for the web without learning HTML, which he called “a humane web text generator” — and Textpattern, a content management system built around it. TextDrive was where both would live. Its customers were the writers, designers, and developers who made the early independent web worth reading.

TextDrive’s founding was itself an experiment. In 2004, Dean and Jason offered 200 subscriptions at $200 each, raising $40,000 to purchase and set up hardware. Dean called the subscribers his “VC200” — a small joke at the expense of venture capital. He and Jason were subscribers one and two. The promise was simple: “How long is it good for? As long as we exist.” Further rounds followed, named with characteristic wit: “Mixed Grill,” “Three Martini Lunch.”

In November 2005, TextDrive merged with Joyent, a recently launched groupware company. Joyent brought collaboration software; TextDrive brought the infrastructure to run it. Jason became CTO of the combined entity and steered it toward cloud computing. Dean became president of Joyent Europe and left the company in 2007.

On August 16, 2012, Joyent informed lifetime account holders by email that their accounts would end on October 31. Those customers had supported TextDrive in its earliest days and considered the lifetime promise binding. The response was fierce.

Dean returned. On August 30, 2012, he announced that TextDrive would relaunch as a company separate from Joyent, honor the lifetime agreements, and continue the shared hosting business. He ran it on Joyent infrastructure and believed he could make it work.

He couldn’t. On March 3, 2014, he wrote:

What began in mid-2012 as an exciting challenge fuelled by good intentions and lean resources quickly turned into a cleanup project with almost no resources. It is disappointing to report that after a year and a half of uphill battles and unimagined setbacks, after several costly efforts to regroup and find another way, options to keep TextDrive growing have run out, and we will cease operations on the 14th of March, 2014. Sorry to have let you down.

TextDrive closed on March 14, 2014. Joyent, the company that had grown from TextDrive’s infrastructure, went on to host Twitter during its years of explosive growth — the era of the Fail Whale error page. Twitter moved to its own infrastructure in 2008. Samsung acquired Joyent in 2016.

Dean died on January 13, 2018, in London. Textile, his markup language, and Textpattern, the CMS he built around it, remain in active use.

This site remains.

Explore the frequently asked questions, the forum and the weblog archives for more insights. Some of those who called TextDrive home are still here.

Uberspace hosts this memorial to a hosting company. They give you a shell and get out of the way. You pay what you think it is worth.