6 ms·
MyRedis acquired by Garantia Data, gives customers 3 days to move off
- Terretta 13y agoNot much notice considering how likely it is for people to be on holiday this week (taking advantage of the long weekend).
- aneth4 13y agoSo they are aquiring a company composed of: 1) brand goodwill 2) customers 3) technology 4) employees Apparently the first two were not worth much and it was even more valuable to create significant negative reputation for Redis Cloud by damaging both. The third is clearly not useful since Redis Cloud is already the "most advanced." Employees, well, they better have a good pay package to stick around after that demoralizing hit. We can safely put Garantia in the category of "couldn't care less about customers."
- technotony 13y agoMaybe it was just an acquihire? Must have been if they care this little about their product/customers...
- ghswa 13y agoPerhaps, but why shutdown the service so abruptly? Why not shut down the service in, say, 3 months, support MyRedis customers to migrate to Redis Cloud (or elsewhere) before moving the MyRedis personnel into their new roles. As somebody without any experience in the world of start-ups the only explanation I can come up is that MyRedis was haemoraging cash so badly that this wasn't feasible however if that is the case why would you want to hire the team? Can anybody with experience of such dealings shed some light?
- jharrison 13y agoGiving only three days and offering to assist with transfers could also point to the possibility that they really don't have that many paying customers to begin with.
- chiph 13y agoThe employees can see how the customers are being treated. I expect most of them will be moving on, negating the acquihire.
- apalmer 13y agoMy assumption is this is a buy and destroy a competitor move. Would almost make sense, except that the splash page publicaly announced who the purchasing company is.
- adrr 13y agoThey could also be buying the assets(servers).
- aneth4 13y agoThe site was updated to a somewhat better 2.5 weeks to shutdown. It now says "Not quite sure what we were thinking on that one!" How could a founder not think about what will happen to customers if they shut their servers down with three days notice? Seems like more than just not "thinking." Defies my attempts at understanding. Anyhow, hopefully no one is taken down too hard by this.
- aaronpk 13y agoFiling this under: "how not to announce an acquisition"
- hvs 13y agoAlso filing Garantia Data under "companies I will never work with."
- 727374 13y agoThis is a great illustration of why I'd never use a startup to host my database.
- nickv 13y agoClassy move - especially w.r.t it being a long weekend in the US.
- CanSpice 13y agoThe long weekend in the US was last weekend, before this announcement. I don't see what that has to do with anything.
- nickv 13y agoEvery company i've ever worked is usually "extra busy" after a long weekend because they're catching up with email/calls/etc that have gathered during it (and also support issues, etc.) Coming into work right after a few days off and having this thrown on your plate with no notice just adds to this. (But ultimately, it's really about the complete lack of notice more than anything else.)
- zheng 13y agoTheir update that data might be kept around until the 30th, but they won't have support after Friday is almost an insult to injury here. I don't understand why they wouldn't just continue to support MyRedis for some reasonable amount of time. So not worth it.
- thepumpkin1979 13y agoWell, I can see it coming... A tumblr to call all startups that are acqui-hired and betraying their customers with such short notices.
- scraplab 13y agohttp://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
- gamache 13y agoI was evaluating Redis Cloud at work, but this gives me real pause. This reflects very poorly on Garantia Data. Any suggestions for other hosted Redis services people like?
- acjohnson55 13y agoIf you want no frills, low cost, you can fire up a Dotcloud Redis instance pretty easily.
- nasalgoat 13y agoIf you really want low cost and no frills, just run redis locally. I still don't understand the point of third party redis - I'm not aware of a service that is more lightweight and CPU friendly than redis.
- _bpo 13y agoI work for RedisGreen - a different take as we do dedicated servers and focus on analytics/monitoring. Feel free to ping me with any questions. bpo at stovepipestudios.com
- garantiadata 13y agoWe understand how you got this impression. We do hope that after the dust had settled it is clear that the decision to shut down myredis.com was not ours to begin with. Aside from obvious reason of growing our business, the acquisition was partly put in place to provide a community of existing Redis user with a reliable and proven solution that they can start using immediately. Do note that we offer a 30-days money-back guarantee existing myredis.com customers if they try our service and are unhappy with it for any reason. Those who aren't myredis.com users and wish to test/use our offer are more than welcome to sign up for any of our services including, of course, the Free plan. If you'd like to open a direct channel to us and discuss this (or any other matter for that matter), please drop us a line at info@garantiadata.com
- richardv 13y agoSome companies just don't understand how to write acquisition/winding down letters. "We're excited" should almost never be used in an acquisition post unless the users also have something genuinely to be excited about. ie. Cookies, Balloons and otherwise exciting things! Instead, what they wrote is: > We're excited to be acquired, thanks for making this possible, now GTFO our servers in the next three days. (Also on another note, couldn't you replicate their entire business in a weekend using Docker, vanilla Redis, and the boto python API?) -------- Edit: (Since this is the top comment, I'll paste the comment from the founder who is hellbanned). -------- Hey, I'm Miles Smith, the Founder of MyRedis. I sent the email this morning and didn't read it through the eyes of my customers. I take ownership of that. We have updated our website, and sent a followup email to all customers, to clarify the availability of customer data. All customer instances and data will be fully online and operational until at least July 30th. Furthermore, I will be storing an archive of all customer data for an additional 90 days, just in case someone missed something. I will be available to help all customers who would like assistance in migrating. Miles Smith Founder, MyRedis ----- (Miles you are hellbanned. No one can see your comments from your current account)
- mraaaaa 13y agothe team page on the website changed in the last few days to remove the other owner it looks like abandonment of the company so they probably dont care about what people think
- wedtm 13y agoActually, it's been a struggle for me. I've gone through two co-founders, who, in their own ways, just didn't work out. Who knows, maybe it's me. All I DO know is that my customers were starting to be affected by it, so I had to do something. The entire reason for this acquisition was for the customers. They need someone who can take care of them like they deserve.
- pynchonian 13y agoJacob Jervey, the guy who was listed as co-founder and lead engineer of MyRedis until yesterday, was arrested for sexual assult. Maybe this had something to do with it? http://vpsboard.com/topic/679-jacob-kiefus-jwj-jacob-jervey-of-brohoster-and-lethaldrive-arrested-for-lewd-and-lascivious-behavior-sexual-assault/ http://vpsboard.com/topic/679-jacob-kiefus-jwj-jacob-jervey-...
- angersock 13y agoI'm not sure that I see the big deal here--the message seems to be "Hey, we're going to be turning off these features, and migrating user data over here as needed. Here's where to file support tickets, here's the timetable for service deprecation, and here's what may or may not be under our old SLA." Though it is somewhat annoying, it's hardly a slap in the face for people.
- gamache 13y agoWhen that timetable is 72 hours long, it's a slap in the face. We'd be talking about this a lot differently if MyRedis' sunset were six months out.
- zerop 13y agoNever understood why would someone like to use hosted Redis solutions from redis-cloud, redistogo etc... Their Customers are developers.. why cant developers spawn an instance with Redis on it and use it themselves.. how does this hosted redis business model work..?
- gamache 13y agoI have modest needs from Redis -- basically I want a queue ~1000 items long, under 1MB per item. I could provision a couple of EC2 servers, get Redis going on them, set up some sort of monitoring, some failover mechanism, etc. $X/month. Or I could pay someone $Y/month to give me a Redis server I can use, and not have to care about the rest, so I can spend time worrying about things more relevant to my actual goals. If $Y is not much more than $X, it's a very easy decision.
- nasalgoat 13y agoIf you have modest needs of it, just run it on the same machine. The whole point of redis is low latency data queries, which running on some third-party service you lose.
- gamache 13y agoThat might be a point of Redis, but it's certainly not the whole point, as I don't care about it but Redis is still useful to me. And again, just because I can do it myself doesn't mean I should. I came into adulthood as a sysadmin. I can take a project from bolting racks into the floor to writing front-end code, but I don't. There are better ways.
- Aqua_Geek 13y ago> just run it on the same machine Sometimes you don't have that option (e.g. Heroku).
- loginalready 13y agoYou just answered your own question. Their customers are developers, i.e., a scarce and expensive resource who's time is most effectively spent developing rather than configuring, tuning, monitoring and otherwise maintaining server parks, virtual or not.
- wedtm 13y agoHey, I'm Miles Smith, the Founder of MyRedis. I sent the email this morning and didn't read it through the eyes of my customers. I take ownership of that. We have updated our website, and sent a followup email to all customers, to clarify the availability of customer data. All customer instances and data will be fully online and operational until at least July 30th. Furthermore, I will be storing an archive of all customer data for an additional 90 days, just in case someone missed something. I will be available to help all customers who would like assistance in migrating. - Miles Smith Founder, MyRedis
- vibrant 13y agoThis story repeats with most such startups: - indextank - was a great cloud full text indexing service, acquired by linkedin - mailgun - acquired by rackspace - still functioning but they stopped expanding into interesting directions and are winding down some of their more advanced APIs So bottom line is, if you want to be sure about your data, set it up on your servers instead of some hot cloud providing startup..
- loginalready 13y agoYou can reduce this argument all the way to writing your own OS and building your own hardware. And no, that is not ad absurdum, there are valid real world business cases for both. It all depends an a simple cost/benefit calculation. There's no absolute right or wrong choice. Also, not having the knowledge to do something is a way bigger vulnerability than outsourcing the execution. My preferred approach is to figure out how to do it ourselves, immediately followed by finding a 3rd party to outsource it to once we know exactly what we need so we can focus on other things. And of course always make sure we are able to take it back.
- loginalready 13y agoNote to self: never use Redis Cloud or any service offered by Garantia (oh, the irony of that name...). This is not hypothetical, I'm seriously considering using a Redis cloud service instead of running our own.
- jefe78 13y agoI'm actually in the market for a similar service. We need simple/turn-key Redis clustering. Twemproxy lacks the features we need and I don't have the time to find alternatives. -Sysadmin Edit: Someone contact me. I want to give you money!
- garantiadata 13y agoWe entirely sympathize with your sentiments given the inflammatory nature of this discussion. We hope that the clarifications provided helped you to change back your mind. If, however, you are still doubtful of our standing commitment to our customers and the entire Redis community, please contact us at info@garantiadata.com so we can have a real dialog regarding your concerns.
- mbell 13y agoIt appears that the owner has responded several times in this thread but is hellbanned. For those that don't have show dead on: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=wedtm https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=wedtm EDIT: Apparently you still need to enable show dead to see his recent comments even when using the above link.
- chicagobob 13y agothis. good edit. was just going to post to say this.
- eksith 13y agoThe thread that initiated the hellban seems to have been plucked right out of Reddit. A case study of how not to behave on HN.
- nazka 13y agoCan they really do this? They haven't obligations for their customers? It is strange on a justice point of view. It is not because they acquired it than they have all rights such as break any current contracts.
- garantiadata 13y agoWe totally agree and our customers ALWAYS come first. Regrettably this entire discussion, while valid in other contexts, is the result of human error. myredis.com will continue to be fully operational until the end of the month. At that date it will discontinue its operations due to reasons that are beyond our control. We invite every myredis.com user to give our Redis Cloud service a try and decide for herself/himself whether we live up to their expectations. Furthermore, all paying myredis.com who will choose a comparable subscription from our service for their business, will be given a 30-day full money-back guarantee so they'll be truly free to make their own choices without risk.
- miles-myredis 13y agoI'm not quite sure why I was hellbanned. I guess that's the point of it though. I want to apologize to everyone who was affected by this. MyRedis was my first SaaS, and it was a learning experience in many ways (and continues to be, apparently). I have adjusted the shutdown dates to give everyone more time. On a personal note, here's a brief backstory to explain how I got here: I started MyRedis as a technical co-founder almost a year ago. Since then, two other people have filled the other co-founder role. One decided to move to NZ one day without notifying me, and start working for some "dream job" company. The other, as has already been pointed out in this thread, was arrested recently. MyRedis was starting to grow at a rate that I no longer felt comfortable saying I could manage. I was starting to fall behind in basic admin stuff, and it wasn't fair to my customers. This was the entire reason I finally decided to find someone who could take care of the MyRedis customers, and hence, where we are today. I've spent nearly $50,000.00 of my own savings to build MyRedis, and support my family while doing so. I've learned a ton, and I'm going to pick myself up and do it again, someday. I hope this transparency sheds some light on MyRedis. It wasn't some big company, it was me. I woke up every day and personally answered tickets, wrote code, and lived and breathed MyRedis. In the end, though. It's the customers who matter.
- opendomain 13y agoMiles, If you want to apply what you learned hosting other NoSQL databases in the cloud, please contact me HN AT nosql dot com.
- miles-myredis 13y agoSent you an email.
- jacquesm 13y agoEvery time something like this happens the rest of us have it just that much harder.