I fondly remember Joyent as one of the first companies to do Ruby on Rails hosting right. They were using a combo of FreeBSD, Virtualmin, Apache (proxying to mongrel etc).
Fun times!
Fun times!
Edit: It's also how Twitter used Virtualmin in their early days, as they were hosted at Joyent. (I didn't know this until Evan Williams told me at a YC event. That was pretty cool.)
It was a pleasure dealing with the Virtualmin team on issues we had on Virtualmin on Joyent and TextDrive's shared hosting services.
Replying to the "Wins over GCE/AWS above that I can't reply to":
They had various:
* The ability to run workloads at near bare metal speeds (their using Solaris Containers).
* Manta (ability to perform compute operations on their storage service without having to download files and reupload files).
* Their work on getting a better user experience in zones with pkgsrc (thanks to all the hard work of Filip and Jonathan).
* Better performance and having the ability to spend less money on resources and reducing the instance count for folks moving off AWS to Joyent. I was involved in a number of these migrations.