Dear Joyent | Hacker News Reader

Dear Joyent

svallens.com

41 pointsepall20 comments

My name is Rod Boothby. I head up the Evangelism team at Joyent.

It's true that some of our user interface stuff needs improving. We are planning on delivering some powerful solutions in the near future.

Over the past year, we have been focusing on helping clients deploy truly massive sites. The largest Ruby on Rails application in the world runs on Joyent.

http://www.joyent.com/a/scale-rails-to-1-billion-pageviews

Joyent has helped clients like ABC, CNN, Disney, Boston.com, and Gilt.com to deploy and scale sites that deliver Billions of page views a month.

For example, we have a Drupal site running on Joyent that can support 2.5 Billion page views a month.

Over the last month, we have delivered to clients solutions that you simply can not get from some of our competitors mentions below..

#1 Joyent VPN Cloud - a secure cloud deployment that is segregated at the switch level. This delivers the PCI compliance required by large sites.

#2 Joyent's Virtual Data Center software - we will be announcing more in the next few weeks, but the first instance of this product was delivered to a client in Japan in December '08. Even with virtualization solutions like XEN or VMWare, most data centers can only achieve 8% to 12% utilization. Joyent's Virtual Data Center software can help large data centers to achieve up to 80% utilization.

#3 Joyent Cloud as a Service API. For an example, check out what Aptana has down with Joyent's API: http://www.aptana.com/cloud

The stuff coming down the pipe is also really interesting.

The first includes a new tool that lets you fully instrument a production application and get true performance analytics designed to help you identify bottle necks and you to true Application Performance Level agreements.

The second is a new web based interface that lets you manage complex cloud deployments.

If you have questions, our would like to learn more, please feel free to ping me directly. ( rod at joyent ).

Jeez, can this sound more like a marketing pamphlet please? Are you going to address the blogger's concerns, or are you trying to distract us with shiny objects?

I litereally just, JUST. Like two moments ago, paid for a year of a 1Gb Accelerator.

What has Joyent done thats bad? I know their control panel is a tad clunky, but their support has always been top notch - sure its slightly pricey but I feel really confident they wont fuck up.

I don't think they've done anything bad. But, as the article mentions, EngineYard hasn't let go of the after-burner trigger since it's launched.

If nothing else, it's a great way to see how an underdog can quickly push ahead of a entrenched prize fighter.

There is nothing that they do so bad. The issue is that there's nothing that they do that's so compelling.

Today, you can get a VPS from Slicehost, Linode, Amazon, or a number of other providers. A few years ago, Slicehost was just starting up and there was a waiting list of months sometimes, Amazon's EC2 had no persistent storage, Linode was using User Mode Linux which is terribly slow. . . Joyent was fast, had lots of bandwidth, SAN storage, offered 16 and 32GB RAM servers, were the host of next big thing Twitter, and were the official host of Ruby on Rails.

Today, Slicehost is a division of Rackspace and SAN storage will probably be available soon. There is no waiting list or prepayment for Slicehost anymore and you can grab a 15.5GB server. Slicehost is under half the price of Joyent except for transfer costs (Joyent includes 10TB with each plan - whether that's like Dreamhost's "unlimited" bandwidth is yet to be seen). Today, EC2 is no longer beta, comes in various sizes (medium, large, XL) and has persistent storage. And all three (Linode, Slicehost and EC2) all offer instant activation. With Joyent, it's a human-run system.

That probably one of Joyent's biggest failings. While Slicehost automates all of its build process so that you can be up in a couple minutes, Joyent requires a tech person. More than that, they tied themselves to OpenSolaris and Sun and there hasn't been as much activity there. Plus, they're telling everyone to use Solaris' Blastware packaging system which is just bad and most people would rather have their own Linux flavor (as their competitors allow).

Now for Joyent's advantages:

-Zones offer fast disk access compared to Xen. This probably makes it more suitable than Slicehost or Linode for a really high-end database server, but it probably wouldn't beat EC2's EBS which is just really fast.

-SAN storage. Joyent can offer you (virtually) as much storage as you need. EC2 can as well, but Slicehost and Linode can't.

Joyent used to be where it was at. Linode, Slicehost, and EC2 have caught up and in some ways surpassed it. Combined with a lack of polish on the Joyent backend (surprising since they spend a ton on their frontend polish) and it just doesn't look great. Don't worry too much. It's not as if it's terrible or anything. It will serve you, but you probably could have gotten something cheaper somewhere else. Joyent needs to rework some of its infrastructure to remain competitive with a Rackspace owned Slicehost, a non-beta EC2, and a Xen-powered Linode that is constantly increasing CPU, bandwidth, RAM, and disk to its users.

Bottom line: Joyent offered a scalable storage, CPU, and RAM architecture back when Slicehost, EC2, and Linode didn't. So, if you thought you were going to be the next big thing and need a few 8GB servers, Joyent was the only game in town. They aren't any longer and don't seem to be taking steps to ensure they aren't history as others improve.

I don't know if this is still a problem, but for a company that claims to be the official Rails host; they don't work closely with popular Rails related software.

For example a few months ago the latest version of Capistrano wasn't working on Joyent's Accelerator (Solaris). Joyent support acknowledged this, but it didn't sound like they even cared or planned to do anything, so I just canceled my account and I moved to Slicehost. It's not perfect but you get more for the money.

Just out of curiosity, why did you go with Slicehost instead of Linode? For Rails hosting, RAM seems to be limiting factor if you only want to spend $20/month. On a Linode 360 I'm running 3 mongrels, nginx, and MySQL with some RAM to spare for crons and such. I'm just curious what advantages a Slicehost 256 would give me considering RAM seems to be the main difference between the two.

that's simple, because until now I haven't even heard of Linode; thanks for the tip

If you are starting out with linode you should be aware of the backup policy. Basically you have to roll your own. Let me know if you have any linode questions. I've been using them for about a year now. I think backups are the only feature linode is missing (compared to slicehost).

Linode is a good service, but in some ways it's newer than Slicehost. Slicehost was a pioneer in Xen virtualization. Linode, until the end of March 2008, used User Mode Linux. Xen has a lot of advantages as a server virtualization platform and Linode saw that and migrated.

So, Linode can be seen as less mature with their Xen setup than Slicehost. I've had no problems with either and I don't want to imply that Linode isn't reliable or anything of the sort. However, Slicehost implemented a Xen architecture about 2 years before Linode and sometimes businesses like a longer track record.

So, Slicehost became embedded in the mindset of many in the hacker community. For one, it was Xen and Xen is just better than the User Mode Linux that Linode used until recently. For two, Linode didn't always offer such a RAM advantage. When Slicehost was launched in 2006, you got a 256MB slice for $20. According to the Linode blog, they were offering 100MB for that price. It wasn't until March of 2007 that Linode equaled Slicehost with 256MB - and it was still running User Mode Linux. Part of it was right thing at the right time. Slicehost got in with Xen right as virtualization was going to take off and had a superior offering. Now, they cost a little more, but part of that is for the reputation they've built for themselves. I hope Linode starts building up their reputation now that they're Xen backed and offering a superior package per dollar and I hope that pressure from Linode will get Slicehost to offer a little more.

That's probably way more of an explanation than you wanted of why Slicehost holds the position it does in the hacker community.

The support has gotten better over the past few years, but I would hardly say it's top notch. And it used to be really bad.

If you're running a business where unexpected downtime costs real money, as I was, Joyent's ticketing system was totally inadequate. We've since switched to a dedicated box at Rackspace (for quite a bit more money) and I've been extremely satisified. It's expensive, but Rackspace support really is top notch. (For example, I once fat-fingered an iptables config rendering a server totally inaccessible. Rackspace detected the problem, sent someone into the data center to bring up the console, fixed it, and sent me some tips on iptables before I could even file a ticket.)

I left Joyent several years ago for much the same reason. Their shared hosting was unusable for Rails. Joyent's Accelerators look like a nice solution, but they are significantly more than a VPS. I've been with VPSLink for several years and am very happy with them.

I actually haven't even migrated off the FreeBSD servers yet. I'll go when they tell me to, but I don't need anything more than I've got.

I've had them for 3 years and been very happy with their service. (Though I agree that their long-promised big improvements sure haven't happened since becoming Joyent).

Have fun paying Engine Yard's hosting bill. Hope you got a VC round.

I'm an EngineYard customer with no VC. We've also had to increase our resources and storage several times since launching.

If your startup actually grows and makes money, you can pay for high-quality hosting and growth ...

funny how that works ...

My startup has grown and is profitable, and I would never pay that. We pay about the same amount for a 16 core beast from Softlayer as you get there for one slice, which is weaker than a $300 Dell I bought two years ago.

What makes you go that route over any normal hosting solution?

For the specific Rails app we run at EngineYard, the fully-managed aspect is very attractive. I've got multiple apps and even multiple business ventures–so I can't be hands-on at the server level for everything.

Their staff is very pro-active and always available. I could go on, but my point was simply that EngineYard isn't just for vc-backed companies who need to burn some cash.

And, for the record, I also am a Slicehost and Joyent customer.

So essentially you're buying consulting? I guess that makes sense.

I'm not sure that managed hosting == consulting, but I suppose that's a fair way to look at it.

Both Rackspace and Engine Yard have called me on the phone to alert me of potential problems. I'm not sure that's something a consultant would do.

Just a bit second thumbs up for Softlayer here. Used them for a few years and they've been persistently excellent. I also use Linode too now though for smaller stuff.

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