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Right now we're running 1 dedicated server for our startup. We pay $250/month for a 4GB machine. We're a hosted application in the enterprise software space (

Right now we're running 1 dedicated server for our startup. We pay $250/month for a 4GB machine. We're a hosted application in the enterprise software space (reporting & business intelligence). We've been in beta with a customer but we're about to go live in production, and I'm wanting to add a couple more servers for uptime reliability. I started looking around and Joyent gets good marks. It seems though pretty expensive for what is, at the end of the day, a VPS. We're looking at $250/month for a 2GB/1CPU slice, whereas now I can get more computing machinery from a managed dedicated provider. I'll probably be needing 2 web servers and a DB, so total cost might push $750/month which seems high to me. In short--are the benefits of Joyent enough to pay those high prices? Anybody here using the Accelerator service?

SwellJoe 19y ago
We have several customers using them (technically, every Joyent customer is our customer, too, since they offer Virtualmin on everything they offer), and the satisfaction level seems quite high. They are definitely among the smartest guys in the hosting business from a technical standpoint, and they build a lot of their technology in-house. The price is a wee bit high, though it's often difficult to compare virtualized systems in an apples-to-apples manner. Accelerators are Solaris Zones, which are significantly more efficient than the Linux Xen instances used for EC2, for example. Zones are comparable in implementation to vservers on Linux, though the most popular form of vserver is Virtuozzo/OpenVZ which has some serious memory bugs that strike when a system is over-subscribed--the low-cost providers all over-subscribe and thus all exhibit these memory allocation issues. Joyent boxes are quite large and fast, and not over-subscribed, so you might be pleasantly surprised by the performance you see from them. Their support for Ruby on Rails and PHP is excellent, since the techs there are actually coders who know those platforms well. They also seem to be pretty Perl and Python savvy, though the Solaris packages for Python they use are reportedly problematic for Django. And, the Joyent forums are full of smart folks doing interesting things, which is pretty valuable. That said, they do have their critics. Twitter left them in a huff, and at least one Y Combinator company has had a bad experience with them (I don't know the details). But, every large host has its share of complaints. It's hard to judge without knowing the number of customers they have in total and the average level of satisfaction of those customers (hmmm...that'd probably be a useful service, along the lines of the J.D. Powers automobile surveys--I wonder if anyone does that?).
- mattculbreth 19y ago
  Thanks SwellJoe for the detailed response. And I did notice that a to of the people on the Joyent forums were discussing your product--congrats on that. I think the key is figuring out a) how reliable they are, and b) how much that's worth to me. Right now if our server goes down I have big problems, since its only one box and we're not setup to quickly change to another. With a VPS at least they can just move an image to a new machine, and if we're on 2 or 3 machines already all the better.
gscott 19y ago
I use calpop.com and like them a great deal. They have dedicated servers but I am using there half rack option with my own servers. You would need to do your own load balancing I have found www.cainetworks.com webmux to be reliable and easy to setup.

SwellJoe 19y ago

We have several customers using them (technically, every Joyent customer is our customer, too, since they offer Virtualmin on everything they offer), and the satisfaction level seems quite high. They are definitely among the smartest guys in the hosting business from a technical standpoint, and they build a lot of their technology in-house. The price is a wee bit high, though it's often difficult to compare virtualized systems in an apples-to-apples manner. Accelerators are Solaris Zones, which are significantly more efficient than the Linux Xen instances used for EC2, for example. Zones are comparable in implementation to vservers on Linux, though the most popular form of vserver is Virtuozzo/OpenVZ which has some serious memory bugs that strike when a system is over-subscribed--the low-cost providers all over-subscribe and thus all exhibit these memory allocation issues. Joyent boxes are quite large and fast, and not over-subscribed, so you might be pleasantly surprised by the performance you see from them. Their support for Ruby on Rails and PHP is excellent, since the techs there are actually coders who know those platforms well. They also seem to be pretty Perl and Python savvy, though the Solaris packages for Python they use are reportedly problematic for Django. And, the Joyent forums are full of smart folks doing interesting things, which is pretty valuable. That said, they do have their critics. Twitter left them in a huff, and at least one Y Combinator company has had a bad experience with them (I don't know the details). But, every large host has its share of complaints. It's hard to judge without knowing the number of customers they have in total and the average level of satisfaction of those customers (hmmm...that'd probably be a useful service, along the lines of the J.D. Powers automobile surveys--I wonder if anyone does that?).

mattculbreth 19y ago
Thanks SwellJoe for the detailed response. And I did notice that a to of the people on the Joyent forums were discussing your product--congrats on that. I think the key is figuring out a) how reliable they are, and b) how much that's worth to me. Right now if our server goes down I have big problems, since its only one box and we're not setup to quickly change to another. With a VPS at least they can just move an image to a new machine, and if we're on 2 or 3 machines already all the better.

gscott 19y ago

I use calpop.com and like them a great deal. They have dedicated servers but I am using there half rack option with my own servers. You would need to do your own load balancing I have found www.cainetworks.com webmux to be reliable and easy to setup.