Chronicle of a death foretold -- mine!

My lifetime will end on 31 October 2012. So I am informed by Joyent, which has decided to "sunset" my Lifetime Shared Hosting Agreement. This cost me some $400, back when Joyent was Textdrive, and Textdrive needed money to grow. I was happy to fork over the cash. Dean Allen had a solid reputation, he was doing interesting things, and I am always happy to reduce regular outgoings by paying more upfront. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've had my $400 worth, and then some.

But that doesn't take the chill off Jason Hoffman's email. A deal, I've always thought, was a deal. And I'm not alone. Bellyaching, however, won't solve anything.

The problem is, I'm not expert enough to know what to do next. The nice people at Joyent helpfully offered one-year free of a "512MB SmartMachine on the Joyent Cloud". I don't know what that means. Will it host the handful of blogs I manage? Will I be able to manage it? Will it be worth the $275 a year thereafter to keep it going? Will it stay at $275?

I remember glancing at an offering from Amazon's cloud a few months back, and thinking that it could be worthwhile. Now I suppose I'll have to investigate further. And whatever I do, I suspect I am looking at a couple of lost weekends at the very least.

Anyone who has any advice to offer, please chime in.

P.s. 27 December 2017: I'm glad I gave up on Joyent, although they haven't given up on me. I still regularly get notices of service outages and the like, which is odd as I haven't been a customer for more than five years. It speaks to their true priorities, I suspect. My hosting is currently with DreamHost, which is working out far cheaper now than Joyent's offering. So I'm migrating this post mostly as a matter of record. There is sleaze everywhere.