TextDrive wasn't just a place where you could host a website. It was an experiment in venture funding, a means of bootstrapping a much larger company.

Created in 2004, the web hosting service offered lifetime subscriptions for a mere $200, and those who signed up and paid their money were billed as "mini-VCs" – mini-venture capitalists – who would help feed the progress of the company and receive a life's worth of service in return. Cloud computing company Joyent honored these subscriptions after acquiring TextDrive in 2005, and even continued selling these mini-VC packages.

But the experiment didn't quite pan out – at least not for the mini-VCs. On March 14, according to a message posted to its website, TextDrive will shut down, after months of unreliable service and no technical support.

Although most customers feel that they got more than their money's worth out of the service, many are disappointed with the way the situation was handled by the founders of TextDrive and Joyent, which used the lifetime memberships to stay afloat during its early years. The demise of TextDrive is a cautionary tale for anyone who puts their money into Kickstarter campaigns or other efforts to crowdsource venture funding.

"I'm not disgruntled or anything," says David Foltz, a user experience architect who used the service to host personal projects. But he does point out that Joyent is apparently still thriving, in part of because of the "investments" from him and others.

In 2004, Jason Hoffman and Dean Allen co-founded TextDrive. That year, Hoffman and his TextDrive co-founder offered lifetime subscriptions to TextDrive for $200, pitching the idea as a way to ensure the company's future. Although the customers weren't formal investors, they always thought of themselves as a part of the company, even after Joyent acquired TextDrive in 2005. The subscriptions were honored after the merger, and Joyent continued to offer new lifetime subscriptions until at least 2006.

Joyent shifted its focus over the years from cheap, commodity web hosting packages to more complex cloud infrastructure offerings that compete with Amazon Web Services. Then, in August 2012, Joyent announced that it would shut down TextDrive because the old TextDrive servers had become too expensive to maintain. Allen, who had left the company, then resurfaced to create a new TextDrive hosting service that ran on Joyent's infrastructure, throwing those early investors a lifeline.

"I knew fully well...that one day it wouldn’t be possible to support lifetime subscriptions anymore, and I knew, when the day came that it was no longer possible, I would step back in and take care of those people,” Allen told GigaOM at the time.

Jacques Marneweck, former director of operations for the new incarnation of TextDrive, says in an e-mail that the new venture was initially part of Joyent, but was then spun-out as a separate company. Everything was fine until last year, when the service became increasingly unreliable. "People were complaining about their servers going down for a week or so," says Foltz. "I think mine was down for about three days in November."

TextDrive support was unresponsive to the problems, Foltz says, until the announcement this week that the service will be shut down on March 14. Allen hasn't posted to the support forum since November 2012, and his personal website is now offline, and his Twitter account hasn't been updated since June. According to Marneweck, TextDrive have not paid his salary since it was spun out of Joyent in February 2013.

"What began in mid-2012 as an exciting challenge fueled by good intentions and lean resources quickly turned into a cleanup project with almost no resources," the announcement on the company's website says. "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." Foltz says many TextDrive customers are moving their sites to Kaizen Garden, a new hosting service Marneweck started after leaving TextDrive.

It's a sour note for TextDrive to end on, even though Foltz and other customers did get several hundred dollars worth of hosting out of Joyent and TextDrive over the years. Mostly, they feel like they're not being properly appreciated by Joyent, which went on to raise over $100 million in venture capital from more traditional sources. "If you look at it from the perspective of making an investment and believing in someone, then, yeah, I think we were given the cold shoulder," he says.

Foltz thinks a classier move by Joyent would have been to fully refund all of its customers back in 2012. "That would have been more appropriate thing for a company with deep pockets like Joyent to do," he says.

Correction 5:47 EST 03/04/14: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Jason Hoffman as the co-founder of both Joyent and TextDrive. He is only the co-founder of TextDrive.