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Comment by kylecordes | Hacker News Reader

I generally like Joyent, and use them. So I offer this tip with a tinge of sadness:

It looks like these message are from a problem with their Howe server. That is one of their old servers, which came over from the Textdrive merger years ago. I used to have some sites hosted on that same server, and was likewise not very happy with things. It appears to me that Joyent as a company doesn't care very much about that legacy equipment and line of business.

The way to make the pain stop, is to stop using Joyent's old TextDrive servers. You can do that by leaving Joyent entirely, or by moving to their newer stuff. Either way it's a fair amount of work, depending on the complexity of what you are hosting.

I took the path of moving to their newer stuff, and have been very happy with Joyent ever since.

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I had a lifetime account with TextDrive. I don't know if it was official policy at Joyent to neglect the old customers, but I certainly felt like I was being pressured to repurchase services I had already paid for. After several outages, data loss and extremely slow responses from tech support I switched to linode. No problems since.

+1 for Linode. I've literally never had a problem. I'm a huge fan and I'm picky as hell.

Not comparable for this.

Agreed. They're better.

I had a server go down twice due to outages at their Fremont data centre, but otherwise I've been very pleased.

I'm also a massive Linode fan, but here's my monthly HE-Fremont Data Center rant... don't run anything out of there (regardless of whether it is through Linode or a 3rd party).

The overal quality of their (Hurricane Electric, not Linode) operation is poor, historically they have been lax on shady people colo'ing rack space in Fremont (google hurricane electric mccolo), HE-1 is full and so little room for expansion and its on a fault line.

I've NEVER had any of these problems in Newark (which is Linode's geographically local DC as they are in NJ) or London.

So I've learnt since the first time things went kerflooie.

However I chose Fremont because it's the closest datacentre they have to Australia. Most of my readers are here.

Are the ping times and connectivity noticiably different for you between Linode's Fremont DC vs Linode's Dallas DC?

(see http://www.linode.com/speedtest/ for pingable hostnames of servers in each DC + speedtests)

If you do want to move, you can put in a ticket and they can move you between DC's with no downtime I believe or just replicate your instance and switch IP's.

It adds ~50ms to move to Dallas. That might be worth it, actually, it's not as though I'm hosting an HFT platform.

For those of us in AU, the Fremont DC is the best choice for us Linode customers.

However, I've learnt, and hopefully have others, that having everything in one basket isn't the best option, even with how excellent Linode are, they are at the mercy of HE etc.

So now we have a split between Fremont, Dallas & Newark.

It's worked pretty well, we are most happy.

Anyone running a large app or site would do well to run multiple systems with Linode across multiple sites where possible.

It's just a pity Australian bandwidth is so ruinous, or I'd move my servers here.

I was hoping to not see a comment like this. I, too, bought the lifetime account back when I was active with Textpattern CMS and joined in as part of a drive they had to raise funds (managed by Dean Allen, the originator of Textdrive and then at Joyent, who has seemingly disappeared into the ether since then). At the time I knew it was a bit of a risk but I had my fingers crossed that their word would be good. So far, my sites (on the Pendrell server) have been doing fine but I always worry about it... thus my fear at seeing a comment like yours.

Hi. This is Jason Hoffman, Dean's co-founder of Textdrive and current founder at Joyent. If you're worried about your sites on the old Pendrell, then go over to support and take the upgrade that's been offered and migrate off.

I think maybe you should resort to an approach other than one can be basically summed up as "upgrade and/or shut up." I love node.js and by extension Joyent so please don't take this the wrong way.

Also I think I have learned from this thread that 'lifetime' service packages suck because after the company closes that deal they have absolutely no incentive whatsoever to do anything more for you as you've basically just agreed to become a burden for them forever.

Wow, a comment like this makes me glad I am with Linode. Way to not value all of your customers.

What's wrong with offering a solution? If you are having problems with that server, allow us to migrate you to another one. Sounds fair enough to me.

No, it sounds more like "you're costing us money now, so we don't give a crap about maintaining those servers anymore. If you really care about stability then pay us more money for our other service."

They should pull up the old contract, find out exactly what can be done to either terminate or transition people to the new services and get it over with. This seems like they're just letting the issue run off the rails and then when people complain that a server is down an extended period of time, a server that they paid a lifetime membership fee for, they start spouting off that these people are whiny freeloaders.

If the servers are old and rickety, migrate them to the lowest level of your new service for the same cost as what the person paid for initially, given that they've already paid in full, this would put the customer cost at $0. If you don't want to do that, then maintain the old servers and give them as much love as you would your other customers. That love includes not getting pissy in public about people whining over "free" servers, especially when they _weren't free_.

Jason, I remember you from back in the day... enjoyed your flickr series of photos where you blogged about setting up the then new Textdrive data center. That even got me to install open solaris and use it as a headless server for a while (and did not add to the downvote pounding you are taking here, FWIW). I don't see anything on the Joyent site about this upgrade offer to migrate off. In fact, I don't see a support section period. Do you have a link?

Hmm, Joyent migrated my TextDrive lifetime account to their newer stuff at no charge. Did you ask Tech Support if there was a migration path for you?

This is correct. We've been offering upgrades to newer stuff. You just need to contact support.

Is the upgrade free/reimburses for the old package?

Do we actually need to contact support to be upgraded? My understanding from the old Shared Accelerator documentation[1] (which you seem to have deleted) was that we were supposed to wait to be offered a “golden ticket”, unless we absolutely needed to be upgraded ASAP.

Are you even still offering regular (not “cloud”) web hosting? I can't find it on Joyent's site anymore; it seems as if the Shared Accelerator plans are discontinued, too.

[1]: http://wiki.joyent.com/shared:kb:start

Edit: Found it. This is the page that implies that TextDrive users have needed to wait for a “golden ticket” to be offered to them: http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20090305040858/http://wiki....

Ah-ha! Looking at the front page of their (apparently new) wiki, I found a link to the old wiki:

http://oldwiki.joyent.com/

And that wiki has up-to-date information on migrating from TextDrive to what are apparently now called “Shared SmartMachines” (formerly Shared Accelerators). And that page finally does resolve the question of whether we need to contact them or wait to be contacted: We do need to ask for a golden ticket, not just wait for it.

That's pretty well buried. Joyent really should send out a mass email to all TextDrive users asking us to upgrade, telling us exactly what effect it would have on our billing, and telling us exactly what we need to do.

It's still unclear whether, in the special case of Howe, we still need to ask for golden tickets, or all Howe users are being migrated to Shared SmartMachines without having to ask. The support post:

http://help.joyent.com/index.php?pg=forums.posts&id=949

implies that they are rebuilding Howe, which implies that we will not simply be migrated to a Shared SmartMachine as a result of the failure (we still would need to ask), but they have not directly said.

The one remaining worry I have is that there's nothing on the main Joyent site about Shared SmartMachines. It seems like they're inviting users of one deprecated service to migrate to another deprecated service.

Same experience for me. I have a lifetime account and they offered the migration to me for free. Granted, I had nothing but email and a vanilla CMS running so I had simple needs but the migration was very smooth.

Nope, they never suggested it and migrating never occurred to me (I assumed it would cost money).

I purchased a lifetime account when TextDrive put out its initial call for VC200 investors. That was many years ago, and I still feel like I'm treated well on the rare instances I need tech support, even though I'm still using one of TextDrive's original servers. They always encourage me to move to a Joyent Accelerator, and at some point I may, but I don't need much from my shared host and TextDrive/Joyent generally exceeds my expectations. Of course, a lengthy down time would change all that. I hope this serves as a wake up call for them and no one else has to go through what happened to the OP and others on Howe. My sympathies.

We never pressured anyone to repurchase anything. And switching from a shared hosting product from 2004 to a VPS at Linode. Makes sense but it's not a side-grade.

I bought a lifetime account as well, then migrated when offered: support and uptime has been the best ever for me.

Holy crap! Fucking Howe! I was on that server three years ago for about two weeks before I could no longer take it. It was a misconfigured piece of junk when it was brand new. I've had a lot of success with Web Faction since then.

The way to make the pain stop

No, the way to make the pain stop (and when I say pain, I mean hours and hours of downtime) is to work with a real managed hosting vendor that cares about your servers and your business, and to move your mission critical software off of commodity shared servers where it will get lost in a sea of customers, none of whom have an account executive, a sales representative, or assigned engineers who understands your stack from top to bottom.

Cloud services are great for some things like elastic computing power and rapid prototyping, but having my business' front door hosted on a service where I can't even call someone up in case of trouble seems like absolute craziness. I mean, how would you even implement a disaster recovery/business continuity solution when all the damn servers are in one building?

This has absolutely nothing to do with "Joyent Cloud". Nothing. The IaaS product has had 99.999-100% uptime this year. This is a 6 year old sharing hosting product that's currently free.

it's currently free? I pay $15 a month for it.

Only "free" for those of us who paid for a lifetime of service in advance when his company was starting. His gratitude is apparently nil.

Not sure that really matters. They offer a service, it was down, there was a shitty response. This is an indictment of the response to the downtime, not the fact that downtime occurred. Downtime occurs in every computer system.

Agreed downtime occurs in every system. Also, the most important function of a datacenter is to keep your application/service up and working properly. Use a third party service to be the first to know when it's down. (disclaimer: I am a founder of Rigor.com, and we provide this type of service.)

"Some products are better" isn't tenable. Regardless of whatever market segmentation you care to do, this extended outage is going to affect customers' perceptions of the diligence of your entire technical staff. If it's impractical to meet these obligations with the same quality as your other products, the thing to do is to buy the obligations out or sell off the unit delivering on them.

No it's not free, I pay $15/month, at least you have posted stuff unlike your support team who haven't responded to me for 48 hours now. Did I mention that this is the SIXTH day my domain and email that I PAY for is still down with no one telling me when it will come up. Don't tell me it's free just tell me when it's going to be fixed.

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