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Joyent - they had me at hello.
Their accelerator concept definitely cool. Modular servers, where you can start small and scale up infinitely as your needs grow. That’s a great idea. And their marketing is pitch perfect. Take a look.
They go on at length about the quality of their routers, about their “thumper” storage cluster which uses the ZFS file system which makes data loss due to disk failure a thing of the past. They post benchmarks showing how outrageously fast their Big-IP hardware proxies can process requests. You get the picture.
This is marketing at its best. And interestingly, it’s pushing the same buttons that martha stewart does when she explains how the vanilla beans she uses are hand picked by Andean farmers and dried at high altitude to preserve their complex flavor.
And I was sold.
But it’s coming down to the wire for me. I want to push out my beta by the end of Jan, so I’m having to deal with the nitty gritty of choosing a hosting provider and a platform. In the end I decided against joyent. Here are the reasons why:
Systemic problems:
This whole Virtual machine using shared storage model is new. The kinks haven’t been worked out. Case in point: several Joyent customers reported HUGE slowdowns recently. We’re talking 2 minutes to serve a static page. The culprit? A mail server on a different virtual machine was doing disk-intensive processing.
When my web app can be brought to it’s knees by someone else doing some data processing….that’s a deal breaker.
I believe the joyent approach is prone to subtle systemic failures because it’s inherently complex. On the other hand, commodity servers may be more prone to acute crashes. But are much easier to deal with because crashes are obvious. And if you use a clustered setup, crashes aren’t necessarily going to bring you down.
It’s too proprietary:
Suppose Joyent folds. If I’m dependant on their special blend of big-IP routing and NAS, I’m screwed. I can’t transition my existing system to a new host, because there aren’t any other like Joyent. Moreover, joyent is VERY scant on the technical details of their setup.
If I’m running commodity linux servers, on the other hand, and the host folds, I can replicate my existing setup without nearly as much pain.
I don’t want people messing with my servers:
When joyent brought their low-end accelerators to market, they revamped their whole network-storage backend. This left several people without access to their files for days.
Again, in the forum, people were talking about how joyent rebooted their servers 5-6 times in a week with no notice.
In the end…
In the end I had to ask myself: “Do I want my business depending on this?”
I think you know the answer.
3 comments ↓
Interesting thoughts about Joyent; I haven’t used them but I did take a look at them at your last mention. Who did you end up going with? I like DreamHost’s Private Servers, which give you a ton of control over your own dedicated resources, with bursting available, but a lot of people don’t like DreamHost because you still are on a shared server setup, overall (including lack of root access), and they’ve had some past issues.
I have heard great things about Amazon’s S3, which sounds like Joyent to some extent, but done “right” by a huge company. Again, I haven’t used them either. And then there’s Media Temple’s Grid Service (gs), which seems to be the most similar to what Joyent appears to be selling. DreamHost is working for me and my company, but our site isn’t quite as mission critical (at least not 24/7 reliability) and cost is a big issue. I can see things to like in all the options, but like I said I’m curious what you went with…or if it was just plain old linux boxes? I have one of those, and I’m getting rid of it because keeping the software up-to-date and managing the box is too much effort for too little return. But it’s a personal box, not a business one.
Hi David,
One other option to consider is slicehost. I’ve heard great things about them and would probably use them if I needed hosting for a blog, or even a non-resource-intensive web application. The only problem I have with them is that it can take a few weeks to order extra VMs…and I need a faster response.
After you mentioned Dreamhost, I took a look at their plans. You might already know this, but there are a number of different virtualization packages that hosts use… Xen, Virtuozzo, Vserver etc. To get the best value for your money, I would use a Xen host. The reason is that Xen doesn’t allow the ISPs to oversell RAM and CPU time, while others do.
Personally, I’ve decided to get a dedicated box and host my own VMs on it. That way, when I need to upgrade, I can just move the VMs onto other servers. If I need to switch hosting companies, I just transfer the VMs…
Best of luck with your hosting search.
Hmm…I’ve never seen SliceHost, thanks for the pointer! I will definitely keep them in mind; we use a VPS at work from a local company now, but will be getting rid of it once we move entirely to DreamHost. The DreamHost Private Servers (www.dreamhostps.com) feature does give you guaranteed CPU and memory and you can use excess capacity on the same server. Much different than their shared hosting, and you can adjust your resources within minutes any time (as well as reboot). They are not using Xen, they use Linux VServer. It is not a true virtualized OS but acts like it in many respects (it’s still a shared hosting account with no root access, but the VServer thing guarantees the memory and processor time).
I’d definitely consider another virtual host in the future (possibly slicehost from what I’ve seen just now), but right now, full control is not what I’m looking for. I have that with my dedicated server right now (want to buy it? I’m getting rid of it either next month or Feb, and it’s relatively cheap!), and I don’t want to manage it any more. Give me shared hosting with dedicated resources!
What works for you depends on your situation and how much time and expertise you feel like committing to server management.
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