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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

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.

iskander 16y ago
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.
- jefe78 16y ago
  +1 for Linode. I've literally never had a problem. I'm a huge fan and I'm picky as hell.
  - jasonhoffman 16y ago
    Not comparable for this.
    - jefe78 16y ago
      Agreed. They're better.
  - jacques_chester 16y ago
    I had a server go down twice due to outages at their Fremont data centre, but otherwise I've been very pleased.
    - dotBen 16y ago
      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.
      - jacques_chester 16y ago
        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.
        dotBen 16y ago
        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/ 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.
        jacques_chester 16y ago
        It adds ~50ms to move to Dallas. That might be worth it, actually, it's not as though I'm hosting an HFT platform.
    - josephb 16y ago
- gaoshan 16y ago
  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.
  - jasonhoffman 16y ago
    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.
    - btipling 16y ago
      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.
    - Klinky 16y ago
      Wow, a comment like this makes me glad I am with Linode. Way to not value all of your customers.
      - gexla 16y ago
        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.
        16y ago
- chuckmcknight 16y ago
  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?
  - jasonhoffman 16y ago
    This is correct. We've been offering upgrades to newer stuff. You just need to contact support.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - random42 16y ago
      Is the upgrade free/reimburses for the old package?
    - boredzo 16y ago
      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 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.joyent.com/shared:kb:migrating-from-textdrive http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20090305040858/http://wiki....
      - boredzo 16y ago
        Ah-ha! Looking at the front page of their (apparently new) wiki, I found a link to the old wiki: http://oldwiki.joyent.com/ 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 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.
- abc3 16y ago
  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.
- jasonhoffman 16y ago
  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.
- thibaut_barrere 16y ago
  I bought a lifetime account as well, then migrated when offered: support and uptime has been the best ever for me.
thedeuce 16y ago
moving to new infrastructure so he doesn't get treated like garbage sounds pretty terrible.
thedeuce 16y ago
moving to new infrastructure so he doesn't get treated like garbage sounds pretty terrible.
tastybites 16y ago
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?
- jasonhoffman 16y ago
  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.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - llimllib 16y ago
    it's currently free? I pay $15 a month for it.
    - enduser 16y ago
      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.
  - tastybites 16y ago
    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.
zackola 16y ago
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.

iskander 16y ago

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.

jefe78 16y ago
+1 for Linode. I've literally never had a problem. I'm a huge fan and I'm picky as hell.
- jasonhoffman 16y ago
  Not comparable for this.
  - jefe78 16y ago
    Agreed. They're better.
- jacques_chester 16y ago
  I had a server go down twice due to outages at their Fremont data centre, but otherwise I've been very pleased.
  - dotBen 16y ago
    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.
    - jacques_chester 16y ago
      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.
      - dotBen 16y ago
        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/ 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.
        jacques_chester 16y ago
        It adds ~50ms to move to Dallas. That might be worth it, actually, it's not as though I'm hosting an HFT platform.
  - josephb 16y ago
gaoshan 16y ago
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.
- jasonhoffman 16y ago
  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.
  - btipling 16y ago
    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.
  - Klinky 16y ago
    Wow, a comment like this makes me glad I am with Linode. Way to not value all of your customers.
    - gexla 16y ago
      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.
      - 16y ago
chuckmcknight 16y ago
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?
- jasonhoffman 16y ago
  This is correct. We've been offering upgrades to newer stuff. You just need to contact support.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - random42 16y ago
    Is the upgrade free/reimburses for the old package?
  - boredzo 16y ago
    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 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.joyent.com/shared:kb:migrating-from-textdrive http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20090305040858/http://wiki....
    - boredzo 16y ago
      Ah-ha! Looking at the front page of their (apparently new) wiki, I found a link to the old wiki: http://oldwiki.joyent.com/ 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 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.
abc3 16y ago
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.
jasonhoffman 16y ago
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.
thibaut_barrere 16y ago
I bought a lifetime account as well, then migrated when offered: support and uptime has been the best ever for me.

thedeuce 16y ago

moving to new infrastructure so he doesn't get treated like garbage sounds pretty terrible.

thedeuce 16y ago

moving to new infrastructure so he doesn't get treated like garbage sounds pretty terrible.

tastybites 16y ago

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?

jasonhoffman 16y ago
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.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- llimllib 16y ago
  it's currently free? I pay $15 a month for it.
  - enduser 16y ago
    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.
- tastybites 16y ago
  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.

zackola 16y ago

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.