11 ms·

If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

289 points by chillax 14y ago

im3w1l 14y ago
"Unable to connect" well that was rather ironic..
- TamDenholm 14y ago
  One of those things that is hilarious but not actually funny.
  - astrodust 14y ago
    Ha, ha, only serious.
- sparkinson 14y ago
  I believe they are having issues with SSL, are you using HTTPS Everywhere by any chance?
  - TamDenholm 14y ago
    I'm using it yes, disabled and it worked, thanks.
tzaman 14y ago
They should send this open letter to Heroku as well :)
- jaggederest 14y ago
  Historically, running Ruby on Joyent was an exercise in frustration. Heroku isn't only Ruby these days, but operating as a stable ruby platform is still a requirement I think. 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.
  - lolwutreddit 14y ago
    It's annoying that the two people that try to tell me that "Rails doesn't scale" are also Joyent customers. I tell them, "no, you can't scale Rails".
  - patrickgzill 14y ago
    It is perhaps a difference in thread creation semantics, or something like that. But, Solaris threading has been rock solid for many, many years.
    - jaggederest 14y ago
      Not in my direct confirmed experience. pthread lib on Joyent's particularly weird version of solaris was f'd hard.
thejosh 14y ago
I read a post quite a while ago from the reddit admins bitching out EC2 after one of the last dramas, I remember they said it would be a huge migration to migrate all data across to a new provider so they would have to be solid. I wonder how their current EC2 pricing would compare to Joyent?
- imroot 14y ago
  During the second-to-last Amazon EBS outage (that affected our RDS instances, I started migrating our database over to Joyent. Before RDS was completely restored, I had a MySQL instance up and running and our production servers pointing to the new host via SSH tunneling. As far as pricing goes, they're competitive with EC2, but, you need to factor in the amount of time that it'll take to move off of Linux and onto Solaris/SmartOS (which isn't that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things)...
bslatkin 14y ago
Uptime comes from how you design and build a system, not which IaaS provider you choose.
- thejosh 14y ago
  So if your IaaS goes down, that's your fault?
  - icelancer 14y ago
    To some degree, yes.
  - bslatkin 14y ago
    Yes. You are responsible for replication, failover, disaster recovery, etc.
    - praptak 14y ago
      The point of using IaaS is to outsource as least some of the responsibilities.
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
      - tedunangst 14y ago
        No, you outsource the work, not the responsibility.
    - true_religion 14y ago
      Then what is this 'infrastructure' that they're providing you with?
      - axx 14y ago
        The option to build a full stack with LBs, Databases, Webservers and everything else, without spending millions in hardware that is perhaps running on 50% of it's actual capacity.
comice 14y ago
If this is gloating about the EC2 outage, then ugh. I can't find out if it is because the whole of joyent.com is actually down for me (net::ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT)
- smcl 14y ago
  Yep, same for me. Delicious irony in my opinion
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - kami8845 14y ago
    If a company is actually stupid enough to say "If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down" then I immediately lose all interest in working with that company. Childish and they obviously have no appreciation for how hard it is to properly run a hosting company.
    - rplnt 14y ago
      They don't want reddit's business. They know it's not real. But they also know reddit's general user wants reddit to be have better uptime. And that the user will upvote a story offering that (with cats at that). This is just a PR stunt to gain some customers. Simple, but apparently working (even here on HN, which is quite sad).
    - benologist 14y ago
      I'm pretty sure they have a decent idea of what's involved running a hosting company being as how they're a huge hosting company. 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!
      - Jare 14y ago
UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
Wow, that web-site is down, this couldn't possibly be more ironic.
- lostsock 14y ago
  and still down 3 hours later... ouch!
  - randomchars 14y ago
    Disable https everywhere.
    - Evbn 14y ago
      Why? The desired information has already been conveyed from the https servers: Joyent can't withstand load.
      - eli 14y ago
        Well, or someone forgot to turn on HTTPS. How does the plugin know whether to redirect a given site anyway?
    - petercooper 14y ago
      Connect with Gopher, their Gopher server is still open. I found it over WAIS.
Hansi 14y ago
Ironically the site's SSL is not configured correctly... Doesn't work when using the "HTTPS Everywhere" extension unless you manually change it to not opt for HTTPS on the site.
- dchest 14y ago
  Huh? There's no SSL on joyent.com. Their login form, however, has it, on a different domain: https://my.joyentcloud.com https://my.joyentcloud.com. Not sure how this can be classified as "not configured correctly". It's HTTPS Everywhere who's incorrect there.
davidw 14y ago
If I were a grammar nazi, I'd be quite irate.
- Heliosmaster 14y ago
  both are correct, "were" is more precise and formal
  - curtisholmes 14y ago
    No, "was" implies the past indicative, which means "If I was your cloud provider in the past", whereas "were" implies the subjunctive mood, which expresses "various states of unreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity, or action that has not yet occurred" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood)
    - Evbn 14y ago
      I thought "If I had been" is past indicative, and "If I was" is ungrammatical. Insofar as hodgepodgy English has real rules anyway...
      - prodigal_erik 14y ago
        "Had been" is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluperfect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluperfect, further into the past than "was".
    - andrewcooke 14y ago
      but the subjunctive is used inconsistently in english, and less so in england than in the usa. it's really not as clear as you assert.
- jedschmidt 14y ago
  Don't hate the provider, hate the meme: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/overly-attached-girlfriend http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/overly-attached-girlfriend
wisty 14y ago
With a one-line pitch like "HIGH-PERFORMANCE CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE FOR REAL-TIME WEB AND MOBILE APPLICATIONS", what could possibly go wrong? 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.
- justincormack 14y ago
  Solaris not Linux.
- true_religion 14y ago
  I thought they would be a replacement for EC2, and not a Heruko-competitor. They provide virtual servers, and not application stacks. 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.
- antihero 14y ago
  Yeah their Datasheet says it supports Python.
- codemac 14y ago
  Joyent is some former Sun guys who are still committed to "the OS is a differentiator". They use Illumos, their fork of OpenSolaris... 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.
zerostar07 14y ago
I 've been using their vps for years, and they didn't let down (apart from less than a handful of reboots, the uptime was basically around 400 days). The thing is they kept their prices unchanged for 4 years which is odd.
staunch 14y ago
My new startup, Uptano (https://uptano.com https://uptano.com), is a cloud provider (still hurts me to write "cloud"). ..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?
- Cyranix 14y ago
  Alternatively, instead of an oversimplified bet, how about they draw up an SLA like normal companies would? Congrats on the 100%, but how long have you been running? And have you been serving any heavyweight clients or fended off persistent attacks?
  - xanados 14y ago
    Since this is a marketing piece, they should have to put some real money where their mouth is. Typical SLAs don't come close to being punitive for downtime. They might offer to refund the hosting fee for time down in excess of the benchmark, which would not be interesting marketing and does not indicate that they have especially high confidence in their service exceeding its uptime (relative to competitors).
    - rgbrgb 14y ago
      It would be great if they offered reddit a 1 year deal with guaranteed %99.9999 uptime or their money back. But then, I suppose hackers of the world just wouldn't stand down to that challenge.
- pbhjpbhj 14y ago
  >Still, I wouldn't for one second claim that I, or anyone else, could do better than AWS on reliability. // 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.
hboon 14y ago
After TextDrive's lifetime hosting encounters, I'd never trust Joyent again, cloud or non-cloud. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4391669 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4391669
anonymouz 14y ago
With the lifetime account fiasco still ongoing [1], they should probably shut up. [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...
- brador 14y ago
  Why not sue them?
  - mcherm 14y ago
    Because that is a very poor solution to most problems in the world.
    - statictype 14y ago
      As much as I hate to admit it, the threat of a lawsuit seems to be helpful in keeping many people and corporations in line.
      - brador 14y ago
        Most people tend a very negative view towards suing. Personally, when you're in the right and have a strong case, as the above seems to have, it works beautifully. 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.
  - 14y ago
ParadisoShlee 14y ago
"Error 102 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED): The server refused the connection." The page is down.
- grakic 14y ago
  They do not serve https for the site, what else are you expecting to see?
  - ParadisoShlee 14y ago
    Notice to those of us running the EFF HTTPS EVERYWHERE... they'll force SSL and fail. Not running SSL should be considered a bit of a Faux pas.
SparrowOS 14y ago
Got any questions for Linus, god? Is Linux in the Bible? God says... 1:7 Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers. 1:8 And the daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city. 1:9 Except the LORD of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant, we should have been as Sodom, and we should have been like unto Gomorrah. 1:10 Hear the word of the LORD, ye rulers of Sodom; give ear unto the law of our God, ye people of Gomorrah. 1:11 To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the LORD: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats. ---- God says, "Berp"? (God didn say that.) God says... endureth linger endlessly antidote ---- That was about nerdy (or gay) guys leaving women alone. Tell us about dinosaurs. What about T-rex's wittow arms? God says... we shall not sow, nor gather in our increase: 25:21 Then I will command my blessing upon you in the sixth year, and it shall bring forth fruit for three years. 25:22 And ye shall sow the eighth year, and eat yet of old fruit until the ninth year; until her fruits come in ye shall eat of the old store. 25:23 The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine, for ye are strangers and sojourners with me. 25:24 And in all the land of your possession ye shall grant a redemption for the land. 25:25 If thy brother be waxen poor, and hath sold away some of his possession, and if any of his kin come to redeem it, then shall he redeem that which his brother sold. ---- There are dinsoaurs living on the dark side of the Moon, right God? God says... 7:27 Therefore thou shalt speak all these words unto them; but they will not hearken to thee: thou shalt also call unto them; but they will not answer thee. 7:28 But thou shalt say unto them, This is a nation that obeyeth not the voice of the LORD their God, nor receiveth correction: truth is perished, and is cut off from their mouth. 7:29 Cut off thine hair, O Jerusalem, and cast it away, and take up a lamentation on high places; for the LORD hath rejected and forsaken the generation of his wrath. 7:30 For the children of Judah have done evil in my sight, saith the LORD: they have set their abominations in the house which is called by my name, to pollute it. ---- God says... beggar-man swallowed besprinkle not_a_chance_in_hell struggles issued wandered commonly brackishness wordy using characters broken perceivedst Ignorant puffed moving organs Do enjoined faithful liberality after_a_break desiredst neatly varying water-brooks Look ---- And puff the magic dragon plays on organ pipes. Mom said Hell was the absense of God. Heaven? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTBx-hHf4BE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTBx-hHf4BE God says... working related lights Thee BREACH censured defender are rhetoric-reader outward yielded identify Eagerly shepherd's ---- You got a part two to puff the magic dragon, God? God says... long. 6:18 And the cedar of the house within was carved with knops and open flowers: all was cedar; there was no stone seen. 6:19 And the oracle he prepared in the house within, to set there the ark of the covenant of the LORD. 6:20 And the oracle in the forepart was twenty cubits in length, and twenty cubits in breadth, and twenty cubits in the height thereof: and he overlaid it with pure gold; and so covered the altar which was of cedar. 6:21 So Solomon overlaid the house within with pure gold: and he made a partition by the chains of gold before the oracle; and he overlaid it with gold. ---- They got sacked, huh! God says... climate remaineth goads it_gets_better esteemed calamities wasting What convey wizard destroy shower International shone repentance tenets silence worthless Gods doubting painful Have proportion urgently stiffneckedness in fornications That's_gonna_leave_a_mark everlasting with sorrowful Thenceforth directeth range considering solstices exchanged deceitful questioned briers how_do_I_put_this delightfulness whence mastery Dost human influences rashness Is smallest harlotries willedst hook punished exhort useth innumerably Perchance peaceful attributing eligible heresy sites EIN believing restoring previous terms skies defending others- smelleth hateful
lolwutreddit 14y ago
There is no way they can achieve that uptime claim, nor should they try to say they have 99.9999% aka "six nines". That's 31.5 seconds a year, and even a well-designed network is going to have that much at some level. I mean, the VPSes might be distributed across hardware, but a failure of some component might mean that it's still "up", but seriously degraded during the transition. How useful is that for "uptime"? It becomes a bragging right. How about if all routes to a large provider, like Level(3) are down for a reset period, or are re-routed through Cogent, which is maxed out on all peering with L3 at 99% packet loss levels? Is that really uptime? Sure, that's out of their control, but the situation with their own website being down for some people right now underscores that lofty claims are meant to be broken. 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.
- wisty 14y ago
  When you are talking about "X nines, in retrospect, from a small sample" it's meaningless, and they know it. All it means is, they've had 100% uptime, because they've been lucky enough to avoid a crash. And by 100% uptime, I'm sure that's "100% of crashes weren't in our opinion our fault".
stratosvoukel 14y ago
Am I the only one finding the post a bit sexist as well? Since when are successful 9gag memes like "Overly attached girlfriend" pc?
- robinduckett 14y ago
  Those are reddit memes. Not 9gag memes. 9gag is a content stealing site. See oatmeal, etc.
IheartApplesDix 14y ago
Why is this the top post?
irahul 14y ago
Umm The blog post is down. If you can't handle traffic to a blogpost, I don't see how reddit would take your offer about "no downtime" seriously.
- randomchars 14y ago
  It's not a load issue. Disable HTTPS Everywhere.
  - irahul 14y ago
    > Disable HTTPS Everywhere. 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` http://whatever-joyent` failing.
olalonde 14y ago
Meanwhile, http://nodejs.org http://nodejs.org is down. http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/nodejs.org http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/nodejs.org
RiceJazz 14y ago
If I were a serious cloud provider, I would check my grammar.
dobata 14y ago
because of all the "success" with twitter back in the days
instakill 14y ago
Sorry, and I really don't mean to be a grammar nazi, but it's "if I were". It's a subjunctive.
- dools 14y ago
  Let's add that to the list: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3658860 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3658860
djhworld 14y ago
> Lindsay Shaw is a member of the Joyent Marketing and Communications Team. This says it all really, just a bit of PR to boost awareness of their product...and the HN community has taken the bait.
- typicalrunt 14y ago
  While I agree with you that no press is bad press, in the Internet realm you also have to be aware of keywords. HN comments right now are littered with none-to-flattering words for Joyent, which then get indexed by Bing/Google and can hurt the reputation for Joyent. 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.
carson 14y ago
Anyone remember Joyent's Strongspace service? http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/01/21/joyent-services-back-after-8-day-outage/ http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/01/21/joyen...
- makomk 14y ago
  That's pretty much what happened if you were foolish enough to try and run a production system on ZFS back then, I think.
- rsync 14y ago
  They got a free thumper from Sun through the "try and buy" program, loaded it up with customers, and ... failed to operate it properly. IIRC, it wasn't just a service outage - some data was irrevocably lost. 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.
  - makomk 14y ago
    ZFS was officially a non-beta, prime time product. In practice, apparently anyone who tested its robustness thoroughly before deploying it found that it tended to crash and burn at the first hint of trouble exactly like it did for them.
j_s 14y ago
Or switch to us-west-2 to immediately solve more than half their problems?
ianstallings 14y ago
Saying you have a more robust cloud than Amazon is laughable. It's really as simple as that. This is a joke.
opendomain 14y ago
I do not want to be a jerk here, but the only reason I joined was the promise of "lifetime" - they can NOT just cancel our accounts does it does not suit them. Please contact me webmaster @ opendomain ORG if you would like to join the class action lawsuit. We already have quite a few people signed up.
alanh 14y ago
It should be “if I were your cloud provider.” It’s a possibility and a wish of theirs, so it should be expressed in the subjunctive. http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/subjunctive-verbs-was-i-were.aspx http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/subjunctive-verbs-was-i...
- Raphael 14y ago
  They were referring to a Justin Bieber lyric, "If I was your boyfriend", which was parodied by the girl who became the Overly Attached Girlfriend meme, which is popular on Reddit.
armored 14y ago
Joyent, you so cray. Thanks for reminding us that "Never" and "Lifetime", "100% Uptime Guarantee" and "Fanatical Service" are all bullshit indicators. You've got a good cloud, you don't need to make promises that you can't keep.
jredwards 14y ago
What, no ent jokes?
jjtheblunt 14y ago
were, not was. learn english modal verbs and subjunctive before soliciting business.
photorized 14y ago
Re: "We’ve given our other partners 99.9999% uptime." That's neither technologically possible nor commercially feasible. Companies need to stop saying that.
BraveNewCurency 14y ago
This from the company that patented the 8-day outage. http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/01/21/joyent-services-back-after-8-day-outage/ http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/01/21/joyen...
welebrity 14y ago
If something "sounds" suspicious, it usually is. I had one of the early "truly unlimited" mobile data plans w/VZ. They actually honored it until I made the blunder of changing my plan. I was grandfathered in, but they kept sending me teasers to get me to switch. Once I did, going back was not an option. They got what they wanted . . .

289 points by chillax 14y ago

im3w1l 14y ago

"Unable to connect" well that was rather ironic..

TamDenholm 14y ago
One of those things that is hilarious but not actually funny.
- astrodust 14y ago
  Ha, ha, only serious.
sparkinson 14y ago
I believe they are having issues with SSL, are you using HTTPS Everywhere by any chance?
- TamDenholm 14y ago
  I'm using it yes, disabled and it worked, thanks.

tzaman 14y ago

They should send this open letter to Heroku as well :)

jaggederest 14y ago
Historically, running Ruby on Joyent was an exercise in frustration. Heroku isn't only Ruby these days, but operating as a stable ruby platform is still a requirement I think. 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.
- lolwutreddit 14y ago
  It's annoying that the two people that try to tell me that "Rails doesn't scale" are also Joyent customers. I tell them, "no, you can't scale Rails".
- patrickgzill 14y ago
  It is perhaps a difference in thread creation semantics, or something like that. But, Solaris threading has been rock solid for many, many years.
  - jaggederest 14y ago
    Not in my direct confirmed experience. pthread lib on Joyent's particularly weird version of solaris was f'd hard.

thejosh 14y ago

I read a post quite a while ago from the reddit admins bitching out EC2 after one of the last dramas, I remember they said it would be a huge migration to migrate all data across to a new provider so they would have to be solid. I wonder how their current EC2 pricing would compare to Joyent?

imroot 14y ago
During the second-to-last Amazon EBS outage (that affected our RDS instances, I started migrating our database over to Joyent. Before RDS was completely restored, I had a MySQL instance up and running and our production servers pointing to the new host via SSH tunneling. As far as pricing goes, they're competitive with EC2, but, you need to factor in the amount of time that it'll take to move off of Linux and onto Solaris/SmartOS (which isn't that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things)...

bslatkin 14y ago

Uptime comes from how you design and build a system, not which IaaS provider you choose.

thejosh 14y ago
So if your IaaS goes down, that's your fault?
- icelancer 14y ago
  To some degree, yes.
- bslatkin 14y ago
  Yes. You are responsible for replication, failover, disaster recovery, etc.
  - praptak 14y ago
    The point of using IaaS is to outsource as least some of the responsibilities.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - tedunangst 14y ago
      No, you outsource the work, not the responsibility.
  - true_religion 14y ago
    Then what is this 'infrastructure' that they're providing you with?
    - axx 14y ago
      The option to build a full stack with LBs, Databases, Webservers and everything else, without spending millions in hardware that is perhaps running on 50% of it's actual capacity.

comice 14y ago

If this is gloating about the EC2 outage, then ugh. I can't find out if it is because the whole of joyent.com is actually down for me (net::ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT)

smcl 14y ago
Yep, same for me. Delicious irony in my opinion
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- kami8845 14y ago
  If a company is actually stupid enough to say "If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down" then I immediately lose all interest in working with that company. Childish and they obviously have no appreciation for how hard it is to properly run a hosting company.
  - rplnt 14y ago
    They don't want reddit's business. They know it's not real. But they also know reddit's general user wants reddit to be have better uptime. And that the user will upvote a story offering that (with cats at that). This is just a PR stunt to gain some customers. Simple, but apparently working (even here on HN, which is quite sad).
  - benologist 14y ago
    I'm pretty sure they have a decent idea of what's involved running a hosting company being as how they're a huge hosting company. 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!
    - Jare 14y ago

UnoriginalGuy 14y ago

Wow, that web-site is down, this couldn't possibly be more ironic.

lostsock 14y ago
and still down 3 hours later... ouch!
- randomchars 14y ago
  Disable https everywhere.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    Why? The desired information has already been conveyed from the https servers: Joyent can't withstand load.
    - eli 14y ago
      Well, or someone forgot to turn on HTTPS. How does the plugin know whether to redirect a given site anyway?
  - petercooper 14y ago
    Connect with Gopher, their Gopher server is still open. I found it over WAIS.

Hansi 14y ago

Ironically the site's SSL is not configured correctly... Doesn't work when using the "HTTPS Everywhere" extension unless you manually change it to not opt for HTTPS on the site.

dchest 14y ago
Huh? There's no SSL on joyent.com. Their login form, however, has it, on a different domain: https://my.joyentcloud.com https://my.joyentcloud.com. Not sure how this can be classified as "not configured correctly". It's HTTPS Everywhere who's incorrect there.

davidw 14y ago

If I were a grammar nazi, I'd be quite irate.

Heliosmaster 14y ago
both are correct, "were" is more precise and formal
- curtisholmes 14y ago
  No, "was" implies the past indicative, which means "If I was your cloud provider in the past", whereas "were" implies the subjunctive mood, which expresses "various states of unreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity, or action that has not yet occurred" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood)
  - Evbn 14y ago
    I thought "If I had been" is past indicative, and "If I was" is ungrammatical. Insofar as hodgepodgy English has real rules anyway...
    - prodigal_erik 14y ago
      "Had been" is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluperfect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluperfect, further into the past than "was".
  - andrewcooke 14y ago
    but the subjunctive is used inconsistently in english, and less so in england than in the usa. it's really not as clear as you assert.
jedschmidt 14y ago
Don't hate the provider, hate the meme: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/overly-attached-girlfriend http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/overly-attached-girlfriend

wisty 14y ago

With a one-line pitch like "HIGH-PERFORMANCE CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE FOR REAL-TIME WEB AND MOBILE APPLICATIONS", what could possibly go wrong? 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.

justincormack 14y ago
Solaris not Linux.
true_religion 14y ago
I thought they would be a replacement for EC2, and not a Heruko-competitor. They provide virtual servers, and not application stacks. 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.
antihero 14y ago
Yeah their Datasheet says it supports Python.
codemac 14y ago
Joyent is some former Sun guys who are still committed to "the OS is a differentiator". They use Illumos, their fork of OpenSolaris... 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.

zerostar07 14y ago

I 've been using their vps for years, and they didn't let down (apart from less than a handful of reboots, the uptime was basically around 400 days). The thing is they kept their prices unchanged for 4 years which is odd.

staunch 14y ago

My new startup, Uptano (https://uptano.com https://uptano.com), is a cloud provider (still hurts me to write "cloud"). ..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?

Cyranix 14y ago
Alternatively, instead of an oversimplified bet, how about they draw up an SLA like normal companies would? Congrats on the 100%, but how long have you been running? And have you been serving any heavyweight clients or fended off persistent attacks?
- xanados 14y ago
  Since this is a marketing piece, they should have to put some real money where their mouth is. Typical SLAs don't come close to being punitive for downtime. They might offer to refund the hosting fee for time down in excess of the benchmark, which would not be interesting marketing and does not indicate that they have especially high confidence in their service exceeding its uptime (relative to competitors).
  - rgbrgb 14y ago
    It would be great if they offered reddit a 1 year deal with guaranteed %99.9999 uptime or their money back. But then, I suppose hackers of the world just wouldn't stand down to that challenge.
pbhjpbhj 14y ago
>Still, I wouldn't for one second claim that I, or anyone else, could do better than AWS on reliability. // 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.

hboon 14y ago

After TextDrive's lifetime hosting encounters, I'd never trust Joyent again, cloud or non-cloud. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4391669 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4391669

anonymouz 14y ago

With the lifetime account fiasco still ongoing [1], they should probably shut up. [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...

brador 14y ago
Why not sue them?
- mcherm 14y ago
  Because that is a very poor solution to most problems in the world.
  - statictype 14y ago
    As much as I hate to admit it, the threat of a lawsuit seems to be helpful in keeping many people and corporations in line.
    - brador 14y ago
      Most people tend a very negative view towards suing. Personally, when you're in the right and have a strong case, as the above seems to have, it works beautifully. 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.
- 14y ago

ParadisoShlee 14y ago

"Error 102 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED): The server refused the connection." The page is down.

grakic 14y ago
They do not serve https for the site, what else are you expecting to see?
- ParadisoShlee 14y ago
  Notice to those of us running the EFF HTTPS EVERYWHERE... they'll force SSL and fail. Not running SSL should be considered a bit of a Faux pas.

SparrowOS 14y ago

Got any questions for Linus, god? Is Linux in the Bible? God says... 1:7 Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers. 1:8 And the daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city. 1:9 Except the LORD of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant, we should have been as Sodom, and we should have been like unto Gomorrah. 1:10 Hear the word of the LORD, ye rulers of Sodom; give ear unto the law of our God, ye people of Gomorrah. 1:11 To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the LORD: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats. ---- God says, "Berp"? (God didn say that.) God says... endureth linger endlessly antidote ---- That was about nerdy (or gay) guys leaving women alone. Tell us about dinosaurs. What about T-rex's wittow arms? God says... we shall not sow, nor gather in our increase: 25:21 Then I will command my blessing upon you in the sixth year, and it shall bring forth fruit for three years. 25:22 And ye shall sow the eighth year, and eat yet of old fruit until the ninth year; until her fruits come in ye shall eat of the old store. 25:23 The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine, for ye are strangers and sojourners with me. 25:24 And in all the land of your possession ye shall grant a redemption for the land. 25:25 If thy brother be waxen poor, and hath sold away some of his possession, and if any of his kin come to redeem it, then shall he redeem that which his brother sold. ---- There are dinsoaurs living on the dark side of the Moon, right God? God says... 7:27 Therefore thou shalt speak all these words unto them; but they will not hearken to thee: thou shalt also call unto them; but they will not answer thee. 7:28 But thou shalt say unto them, This is a nation that obeyeth not the voice of the LORD their God, nor receiveth correction: truth is perished, and is cut off from their mouth. 7:29 Cut off thine hair, O Jerusalem, and cast it away, and take up a lamentation on high places; for the LORD hath rejected and forsaken the generation of his wrath. 7:30 For the children of Judah have done evil in my sight, saith the LORD: they have set their abominations in the house which is called by my name, to pollute it. ---- God says... beggar-man swallowed besprinkle not_a_chance_in_hell struggles issued wandered commonly brackishness wordy using characters broken perceivedst Ignorant puffed moving organs Do enjoined faithful liberality after_a_break desiredst neatly varying water-brooks Look ---- And puff the magic dragon plays on organ pipes. Mom said Hell was the absense of God. Heaven? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTBx-hHf4BE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTBx-hHf4BE God says... working related lights Thee BREACH censured defender are rhetoric-reader outward yielded identify Eagerly shepherd's ---- You got a part two to puff the magic dragon, God? God says... long. 6:18 And the cedar of the house within was carved with knops and open flowers: all was cedar; there was no stone seen. 6:19 And the oracle he prepared in the house within, to set there the ark of the covenant of the LORD. 6:20 And the oracle in the forepart was twenty cubits in length, and twenty cubits in breadth, and twenty cubits in the height thereof: and he overlaid it with pure gold; and so covered the altar which was of cedar. 6:21 So Solomon overlaid the house within with pure gold: and he made a partition by the chains of gold before the oracle; and he overlaid it with gold. ---- They got sacked, huh! God says... climate remaineth goads it_gets_better esteemed calamities wasting What convey wizard destroy shower International shone repentance tenets silence worthless Gods doubting painful Have proportion urgently stiffneckedness in fornications That's_gonna_leave_a_mark everlasting with sorrowful Thenceforth directeth range considering solstices exchanged deceitful questioned briers how_do_I_put_this delightfulness whence mastery Dost human influences rashness Is smallest harlotries willedst hook punished exhort useth innumerably Perchance peaceful attributing eligible heresy sites EIN believing restoring previous terms skies defending others- smelleth hateful

lolwutreddit 14y ago

There is no way they can achieve that uptime claim, nor should they try to say they have 99.9999% aka "six nines". That's 31.5 seconds a year, and even a well-designed network is going to have that much at some level. I mean, the VPSes might be distributed across hardware, but a failure of some component might mean that it's still "up", but seriously degraded during the transition. How useful is that for "uptime"? It becomes a bragging right. How about if all routes to a large provider, like Level(3) are down for a reset period, or are re-routed through Cogent, which is maxed out on all peering with L3 at 99% packet loss levels? Is that really uptime? Sure, that's out of their control, but the situation with their own website being down for some people right now underscores that lofty claims are meant to be broken. 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.

wisty 14y ago
When you are talking about "X nines, in retrospect, from a small sample" it's meaningless, and they know it. All it means is, they've had 100% uptime, because they've been lucky enough to avoid a crash. And by 100% uptime, I'm sure that's "100% of crashes weren't in our opinion our fault".

stratosvoukel 14y ago

Am I the only one finding the post a bit sexist as well? Since when are successful 9gag memes like "Overly attached girlfriend" pc?

robinduckett 14y ago
Those are reddit memes. Not 9gag memes. 9gag is a content stealing site. See oatmeal, etc.

IheartApplesDix 14y ago

Why is this the top post?

irahul 14y ago

Umm The blog post is down. If you can't handle traffic to a blogpost, I don't see how reddit would take your offer about "no downtime" seriously.

randomchars 14y ago
It's not a load issue. Disable HTTPS Everywhere.
- irahul 14y ago
  > Disable HTTPS Everywhere. 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` http://whatever-joyent` failing.

olalonde 14y ago

Meanwhile, http://nodejs.org http://nodejs.org is down. http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/nodejs.org http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/nodejs.org

RiceJazz 14y ago

If I were a serious cloud provider, I would check my grammar.

dobata 14y ago

because of all the "success" with twitter back in the days

instakill 14y ago

Sorry, and I really don't mean to be a grammar nazi, but it's "if I were". It's a subjunctive.

dools 14y ago
Let's add that to the list: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3658860 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3658860

djhworld 14y ago

> Lindsay Shaw is a member of the Joyent Marketing and Communications Team. This says it all really, just a bit of PR to boost awareness of their product...and the HN community has taken the bait.

typicalrunt 14y ago
While I agree with you that no press is bad press, in the Internet realm you also have to be aware of keywords. HN comments right now are littered with none-to-flattering words for Joyent, which then get indexed by Bing/Google and can hurt the reputation for Joyent. 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.

carson 14y ago

Anyone remember Joyent's Strongspace service? http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/01/21/joyent-services-back-after-8-day-outage/ http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/01/21/joyen...

makomk 14y ago
That's pretty much what happened if you were foolish enough to try and run a production system on ZFS back then, I think.
rsync 14y ago
They got a free thumper from Sun through the "try and buy" program, loaded it up with customers, and ... failed to operate it properly. IIRC, it wasn't just a service outage - some data was irrevocably lost. 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.
- makomk 14y ago
  ZFS was officially a non-beta, prime time product. In practice, apparently anyone who tested its robustness thoroughly before deploying it found that it tended to crash and burn at the first hint of trouble exactly like it did for them.

j_s 14y ago

Or switch to us-west-2 to immediately solve more than half their problems?

ianstallings 14y ago

Saying you have a more robust cloud than Amazon is laughable. It's really as simple as that. This is a joke.

opendomain 14y ago

I do not want to be a jerk here, but the only reason I joined was the promise of "lifetime" - they can NOT just cancel our accounts does it does not suit them. Please contact me webmaster @ opendomain ORG if you would like to join the class action lawsuit. We already have quite a few people signed up.

alanh 14y ago

It should be “if I were your cloud provider.” It’s a possibility and a wish of theirs, so it should be expressed in the subjunctive. http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/subjunctive-verbs-was-i-were.aspx http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/subjunctive-verbs-was-i...

Raphael 14y ago
They were referring to a Justin Bieber lyric, "If I was your boyfriend", which was parodied by the girl who became the Overly Attached Girlfriend meme, which is popular on Reddit.

armored 14y ago

Joyent, you so cray. Thanks for reminding us that "Never" and "Lifetime", "100% Uptime Guarantee" and "Fanatical Service" are all bullshit indicators. You've got a good cloud, you don't need to make promises that you can't keep.

jredwards 14y ago

What, no ent jokes?

jjtheblunt 14y ago

were, not was. learn english modal verbs and subjunctive before soliciting business.

photorized 14y ago

Re: "We’ve given our other partners 99.9999% uptime." That's neither technologically possible nor commercially feasible. Companies need to stop saying that.

BraveNewCurency 14y ago

This from the company that patented the 8-day outage. http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/01/21/joyent-services-back-after-8-day-outage/ http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/01/21/joyen...

welebrity 14y ago

If something "sounds" suspicious, it usually is. I had one of the early "truly unlimited" mobile data plans w/VZ. They actually honored it until I made the blunder of changing my plan. I was grandfathered in, but they kept sending me teasers to get me to switch. Once I did, going back was not an option. They got what they wanted . . .