If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down
joyent.com
joyent.com
[1] Joyent/Textdrive sold lifetime shared hosting accounts for a one time payment in the beginning. Those accounts would exist "as long as we exists". A couple of months back they sent an email that they are "discontinuing" lifetime accounts. After uproar from the community they offered refunds. Many people (including me) agreed to the refund, but then they decided to make another 180 degree turn, not paying out the refund. Instead they are now spinning off a new "Textdrive" that is supposed to "take over" the lifetime customers. No details about funding/general outlook/etc. of this new company has been provided so far. Questions to this end are shrugged off as "everything is perfect, just trust us, ..."
Incidentally, the new Textdrive Forum (discuss.textdrive.com) seems to be down at the moment...
I actually avoid unlimited products on purpose because I think a lie is a bad way to start doing business together. Be it web-hosting, broadband, or anything else. I would prefer they just be up front and then we both know where we stand (no ambiguity).
But by pulling out the rug under me[1], it left me distrustful of them. So let's assume that I got my money's worth, but what Joyent has now lost is the word of mouth. Even worse, instead of not telling people about Joyent, I actively turn them away from Joyent.
While Amazon goes down from time to time, at least I have less unknowns with them. With Joyent, I don't know how they are going to fuck me at the last minute when they decide to pivot for the umpteenth time.
[1] Not once, but thrice. First, they cancel the lifetime accounts, forcing me to quickly move to another provider (thank you GAFB and Heroku). Then they say I can get a refund for the service, which when I asked for it they first denied that they gave it out and then told me that the offer was rescinded because the Textdrive service was coming out. Third, they keep calling me telling me that I need to move, even though if they spent 2 seconds checking for account activity they would see that no domain routes to them anymore, nor is any data stored with them.
They may be great technically, but I always mention their spotty/inconsistent and poor treatment of me as a customer. Even if I'm not the most lucrative customer, how you treat every customer is important. You never know who, dispute being a low-revenue personal user, is a high-revenue business user.
When a company is offering "lifetime", "unlimited", "forever" et al, the most likely reason is it is cash strapped and is hoping to raise some cash with these lucrative schemes. I, as a customer, am well aware about "no free lunches" but we are entering an agreement when I buy your supposedly "lifetime" plan. When you do an 180 later because the initial money you got from me isn't enough to keep me running forever, it isn't something unplanned that happened to you. You always knew that. It's just that you are hell bent on screwing me.
That school of thought is very much like the oversubscribed phone lines of yore, which made the phone companies highly intolerant of long modem sessions.
(Clarification: I'm specifically addressing the idea that there can be no "abusive" use of a lifetime offer. Obviously the TextDrive customers are not in this category.)
If I buy a lifetime, fly anytime ticket, and use it all the time, you don't get to call that abuse. If I use the maximum physical quantity of something, for which I have purchased an unlimited supply, that is not abuse. If I am in breach of contract, then I am in breach of contract, but that's not abuse. Abuse implies that you don;t like what I'm doing but I'm not in breach of contract.
Calling something abuse generally means that I've found a use of the service that you didn't forecast for and despite being contractually acceptable, it means you aren't getting the advantage you thought you would from the contract. Expecting me to not use the service to my full advantage is naive at best.
It goes both ways!
That is exactly what contracts are meant to do, and have always been meant to do. And in order to use them successfully, they don't need to be "absurdly lengthy" or anything. The boilerplate you're referring to generally has nothing to do with "abuse" or "being reasonable", and most of it doesn't even need to be there, because if you'd leave it out, it'd be implied.
What you do have to do, however, is stick to the unique terms that you did write in your contract. And if you cannot, don't put them there, or don't offer the contract.
Simple as that. If you offer people unlimited phonecalls, you should be prepared for them to be on the phone 24/7. If you're not, you really shouldn't be offering them unlimited phonecalls, instead maybe offer them 20,000 minutes per month (that's about half of 24/7).
And if "twenty thousand minutes per month" doesn't sound as snazzy as "unlimited minutes", that's too bad because the reality of the matter is that you apparently cannot afford to actually offer "unlimited minutes".
The article I read said they were annoyed that some of these guys would actually use the tickets to, you know, fly places, all the time. As if they had unlimited access.
Did they really expect to sell a $400k item so somebody and for the buyer to fly three times a year?
Sounds like he was not actually using the ticket to, you know, fly places.
Are we really saying that the handful of wealthy people who bought unlimited tickets are to blame for AA's problems, and not the fact that AA appears to have been bad math?
That's an awful lot of strangers to make transatlantic flights with at 200 bucks a pop, and it would take quite a long time to recoup the multi-hundred-thousand dollar investment in the companion ticket. Hardly seems worth the time for somebody who can afford half a million for a couple of lifetime passes.
When bond broker Willard May of Round Rock, Texas, was forced into retirement after a run-in with federal securities regulators in the early 1990s, he turned to his trusty AAirpass to generate income. Using his companion ticket, he began shuttling a Dallas couple back and forth to Europe for $2,000 a month.
"For years, that was all the flying I did," said May, 81. "It's how I got the bills paid."
If you read the Times article you'll see some pass holders sell tickets, book the same route on different flights (in case they get delayed in traffic) and book two seats in order to have more space. It's not just a case of flying too much.
(Of course, they pivoted out of the hosting business and found that supporting a one-off machine is an expensive headache. But it's not impossible for such an arrangement to work.)
http://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/11/flat-rate-stora...
If your needs for service are serious, you should avoid such arrangements.
That's what they're counting on.
I've had the written threat to sue work, as well as the actual suing. It's not as expensive, or time consuming, as you think and is the primary method of contract enforcement. It's also kinda fun and an interesting intellectual experience.
Besides, as far as I understand, Textdrive is in the process of being relaunched, honoring all the lifetime plans.
Here is a company with a history of making tall claims and then doing an 180. How is pointing that out a red herring?
> Besides, as far as I understand, Textdrive is in the process of being relaunched, honoring all the lifetime plans.
From what I know of the story, if they do honor lifetime plans, it isn't out of the goodness of their hearts. They had every intention of flipping the lifetime planholders, and they did, and what they are doing now is damage control.
That isn't particularly relevant to service quality and stability, is it? Maybe it's just me, but I try not to pay much attention to PR bullshit, since they have to make bold claims in order to succeed.
p.s. that their blog was down for the last three hours is somewhat ironic, though.
>> That isn't particularly relevant to service quality and stability, is it?
The claim being made is unlike Amazon, they won't let reddit down. It's relevant to point out these guys have made tall claims in the past and failed to deliver. I won't do business with someone who let's sales swindle customers. Even if the engineering is awesome, there is no guarantee sales didn't sell you something they couldn't deliver.
As far as service quality and stability goes, the only way to evaluate it is to actually switch.
> Maybe it's just me, but I try not to pay much attention to PR bullshit, since they have to make bold claims in order to succeed.
It's possible to do PR without bullshitting. You can always publish your actual numbers viz. number of customers, downtime history, avg issue resolution time. If you are resorting to bullshit, that means you don't have actual goodies.
Did you really mean that?
Of course, that doesn't make their PR blunder look any better, they should've just swallowed the costs, but I don't 'fundamentally distrust' them based solely on this case.
You might have to excuse some here who actually understand lifetime and unlimited to mean more than 6 to 8 years.
> but I don't 'fundamentally distrust' them based solely on this case.
But do you see how others would though?
> That isn't particularly relevant to service quality and stability, is it?
Not from a technical aspect, no. But it is a very important consideration when looking into any service level agreement that they offer to back up the technical claims. If something goes wrong, will they walk away from the promises made in such an SLA as easily as they thought they could walk away from the lifetime accounts? Unlikely I'm sure, but certainly not impossible and the lifetime thing sets a precedent that is difficult to completely ignore especially if you are talking about the sort of money Reddit must spend on hosting related matters.
I'd very much like to keep my lifetime account (I rarely use it for anything, but when I need it, it's there, it's paid for and I can just use it). Problem is, the new Textdrive was essentially launched out of trying to avert this PR debacle, and neither Joyent nor Textdrive have published any information on how this endeavor is funded or supposed to sustain itself (does Joyent pay for the existing customers, as long as Joyent exists? Will it go bankrupt if it can't support the existing customers off of new customers?).
The guy running the new Textdrive seems to have all the right intentions from what one reads on the forums, and I wish him to succeed, but at this point I have no simply no trust left that this will go well (which is why wanted to take the refund).
Hindsight is 20/20, but lifetime service claim sounds too good to be true anyway. Besides, was that 5-6 years of hosting for $500?
It was ~6 years in total duration for me (though used on and off). I recognize that buying monthly hosting for an entirety of 6 years is not cheaper, but it's not what I bought.
I paid the money upfront, knowing fully well that I would not use it continuously, to have a hassle free way to throw up some small stuff if I need it. Others often seem to have similar use cases (or hosting small websites for local community organizations and similar).
I think everybody also recognized that there is a risk the company may go bankrupt, and we're out of hosting, but what's actually happened is that they simply wanted to stop offering the service.
The early adopters didn't just buy a product, they were essentially angel investors.
It's every bit as ridiculous as sending Ron Conway an email thanking him for his help but informing him that his equity has been "discontinued", since the investment was a long time ago and no longer convenient, but warmly offering him a refund for his portion of the round.
I like how you quickly turned this into the "blame the victim" issue. It is a pretty clear and obvious failure yet you keep defending them and blaming everyone who believed them.
This is just a PR stunt to gain some customers. Simple, but apparently working (even here on HN, which is quite sad).
I think what they've done is great, they're appealing to the users by showing they are users and they'll probably get a crapload of traffic because of it whether they land Reddit or not. It's already landed them the #1 slot on HN, a site where AWS staff post AWS updates!
An informative post explaining the hardships of uptime and reliability in simple words, and how they do their best to keep adding 9's, would have been so much better.
curl: (7) couldn't connect to host
Tracing the route to joyent.com (165.225.132.33)
8 * * *
9 65.125.14.38 [AS 209] 312 msec 316 msec 308 msec
10
command timed-out It's not just you! http://joylent.com looks down from here.
joyant.com is up. [...] ip of 208.91.197.128
..and we've had 100% uptime in our short run so far. Our systems are highly redundant and as decoupled as possible. Still, I wouldn't for one second claim that I, or anyone else, could do better than AWS on reliability.
AWS does a great job on reliability. I do think EBS is a terrible technology that should die in a fiery pit, but they do a damn good job of keeping everything up.
If they really do believe their 99.9999% claim, I'd love to see them make a bet. How about Reddit gets $1M if they move and it falls below that?
It's not clear to me whether I'm getting my own server (effectively dedicated?) for $136/month or not.
Further, what if I don't want multiple-tenants on the hardware? What does it cost me to effectively treat each physical server a single logical unit? Is that even possible?
I mostly want a more elastic alternative to dedicated servers. Is your service along those lines?
There is no scenario in which multiple users share the same hardware. Your hardware is your own.
The web site will improve ;-)
Feel free to email me with any questions: jake@uptano.com
Congrats on the 100%, but how long have you been running? And have you been serving any heavyweight clients or fended off persistent attacks?
That may be true over all customers but for reddit I'm estimating about 1 day of downtime for me in a year (that might even be conservative?) - so that's 99.7% approx.
Joyent are claiming that their customers [who?] have only about 30s of downtime per annum.
Reliability obviously extends beyond downtime but still AWS don't seem to be do incredibly well for reddit.
Edit: And allegedly three hours without SSL today, which would put them over 30 s/y for a few more centuries.
No, I don't hate Joyent. I can't even figure out what they offer. And I don't see "Python" or "Postgres" or "Redis" in their tech stack page, so what would reddit (a Python / Postres / Redis site) want with them? They seem to be mostly node.js / Mongo, which is a nice tech stack but isn't the one reddit is built on.
Clicking around their dev docs seems to suggest you can install your own stuff on their "SmartMachines" (are those Linux VMs?), but there's a heavy node.js bias to the docs.
I'm pretty sure python, postgres, and redis all run on Solaris, but Joyent's value add is NOT at the application layer, but in OS features that facilitate application workloads better. Their SmartMachines (or zones), ZFS, dtrace.. Solaris is an epic environment to develop in.
I probably only know of a few other OS's that are as powerful (IOS XR, OnTap, Linux..), and only corner cases are more enjoyable to work with (BeOS, plan9, lispmachine).
Their difficulty in messaging is probably around not wanting to be labelled "post-Sun", but cloud! internet! not oracle! You should think of them as providing an OS as a service.
I wish they'd just say that, as it makes their "Faster than VM" claim seem a lot less wild.
Shared hosting is actually more efficient than VMs, but it got a bad rap due to massively oversold hosts.
And that's my guess on why their marketing spiel might seem a little vague to a tech person.
And I don't see anything wrong with what Joyent did regarding their Reddit-commentary. It just shows that they are playful engineers with a sense of humor, that's all.
PS I think SmartOS is great.
I test drove them with regards to Picc.it, during the beginning of the year and they have a solid stack and great support. They are a little pricey though, so I decided to go with bare metal instead.
ZFS on Solaris was a non-beta, prime time product at that time, so it's not fair to blame it on "a ZFS thing". Deploying customers on loaner hardware is scrappy and admirable, in a way, but Sun wasn't giving those away two by two - there was no redundancy.
The joyent blog, in those days, alternated between enterprise cloud bullshit-bingo posts and facebook game development. I thought it was a clown operation back then and I suspect it still is.
well that was rather ironic..
This says it all really, just a bit of PR to boost awareness of their product...and the HN community has taken the bait.
Worse yet, Joyent's PR may backfire and make them look like naive idiots for making claims they can't back up...especially when it comes to throwing rocks at the Amazon juggernaut.
Not sure how this can be classified as "not configured correctly". It's HTTPS Everywhere who's incorrect there.
Having studied Spanish, "if I was" sounds very strange now. In Spanish it'd always be the subjunctive: e.g. "si fuera..." and never the indicative "si fui...".
Insofar as hodgepodgy English has real rules anyway...
It wasn't that either. It didn't work for me, and for many other people. See the thread for simple `curl http://whatever-joyent` failing.
I wonder how their current EC2 pricing would compare to Joyent?
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/01/21/joyen...
The page is down.
Not running SSL should be considered a bit of a Faux pas.
That's neither technologically possible nor commercially feasible.
Companies need to stop saying that.
Among other things: Solaris threading libs with crashy bugs when you pop a new thread open. Took quite a while to figure that one out.
Now that they're beating that Joyent drum a little more: watch them fall down under a DoS attack that Amazon could bat away at this point. I'm by no means supporting Amazon, but Joyent is still a small company with big claims. I predict they will fall apart when Sun stops making hardware, and when their engineers argue over whatever trendy "wrong way to do it" Node-type technologies that they're jacking off over next.