For me it was the opposite - I was quite happy to pay, but didn't have enough control of, or visibility into, what was going on on the server.

I set up a minefold instance for my daughter and her friends to play on, having previously spent time setting up and maintaining a custom server for her and her friends. Unfortunately, disputes between kids tend to escalate into all out war unless you can monitor and keep a lid on things, so Minefold wasn't the answer either.

If you liked Minefold, I'm working on a service called Pickaxe (http://get.pickaxe.io) that's in a similar vein. It's not up and running yet, BUT you can still register to be eligible to beta-test it (for free) when it's available.

http://get.pickaxe.io

Hey Chris and Dave, This is Dan. I'd love for you to come on Techendo (http://techendo.co/) and have me interview you about your experiences running minefold. I think you've seen a lot and have a lot to share with other entrepreneurs who are trying their own thing now.

Better luck next time guys. Unfortunately they don't always work out. Nice exit note.

Game development and game related development is pretty tough market to crack unfortunately.

Aww, I liked Minefold a lot. I think it was a tad too expensive, though: for my own uses, it was a good order of magnitude cheaper to rent a "normal" server. Still sad to see it go.

I loved Minefold. Sadly, I never got to fully use it. It was a great way to play with some friends though. It sucks they shut it down.

Sad to see another great Minecraft host go down. Minefold and CloudCrafting were the only two hosts which offered hourly servers.

Gawd, freemium is one thing, but it takes some balls to tell a for-profit company, "yeah, your product is great, you just need to make the whole thing free." I understand being accustomed to things being free on teh intarwebs, since I am as well, but do people not take the half-second necessary to realize that it has to be paid for somehow, or it doesn't happen at all? What fraction of the population is really this dumb?

Chris and Dave are a class act. Sad to see em go.