Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

Ouch.

I remember that chunkhost has really aggressive pricing.. And I remember there service being pretty good...

We're Joyent customers as well, and their support has always been great, so this is definitely surprising. You should get on the phone with them (they provide an emergency number). What kinds of machines are you running? Is it just one, or many? It shouldn't be necessary, but message me if you're still not getting through and I can ping some contacts.

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.

I had some issues with a Textdrive server recently as well and migrated over to one of their smart machines (at a lower price than what I had been paying). I was a bit frustrated like you, but Joyent was extremely, extremely helpful in assisting me with the migration and now everything is running smooth.

I would try to touch base with them again and see if they can help you out.

http://www.joyentcloud.com/about/policies/cloud-service-leve...

For clause 2:

  2. Service Level

  Goal: Joyent’s goal is to achieve 100% Availability for all customers.

  Remedy: Subject to Sections 3 and 4 below, if the Availability of customer’s Grid Container is less than 100%, Joyent will credit the customer 5% of the monthly fee for each 30 minutes of downtime (up to 100% of customer’s monthly fee for the affected server).

So probably you can get this month for very little (Takes only ten hours for getting full refund if SLA is signed)

But at the same time their exceptions list are pretty long, things like emergency maintenance and upgrades are considered as exceptions.

I remember trying to get a quote / get a few details about buying large quantities of bandwidth from Joyent a couple years back.

They consistently took days to answer simple questions via email. I generally take it that if a company can't even get its sales people responding quickly there's a snowballs chance in hell it's techs will.

joyent had this sort of failure regularly about 4 years ago and continues to do so. Avoid.

I have one single client who refuses to move off Joyent. My experience with them has been less than stellar. Frequent problems with no explanations, ask a support question like "How does one do X on your system?" and often get "oh you want to do Y I see, here is a link to the support forum for that." and the link isn't at all related to X or even the Y.

They aren't horrible, but I would never use or recommend them to anyone.

I get the frustration. I really do and I apologize for any bump like this. I'm the founder of those old textdrive "share hosting" servers (they really have nothing to do with Joyent's current product line). These servers are ~6 years old and they're largely populated by "lifetime" customers who have tricked out various bits of their accounts enough that an automated migration has been basically impossible. We've been telling everyone for 3 years to really get off of them, we've been offering free upgrades for 4 years, including you btw, you got a free upgrade back in Nov 2007, and there's even support tickets detailing it (which you've participated on). So now we're piecing together everything that was left but those good ole FreeBSD UFS file systems take awhile.

I have a lifetime account as well. Joyent's tech support has always been excellent. I take this as a wakeup call to get my stuff off of the old severs beyond that I can see little fault with Joyent.

Haven't read all the comments but this really seems like a 'special case' being an exception and does definitely not apply to the experience and quality you'll usually get on Joyent.

I have been with them for a couple of years and the only reason why I left was because the project I used to host there was put on hiatus and I don't need that kind of 'enterprise' hosting for my other stuff.

I agree there shouldn't be downtimes on any of their machines but just going by the headline, you'd think Joyent is unreliable when indeed their own server plans are rock-solid.

You make it sound like they are Dreamhost. That said, hope your problems will get solved soon.

T minus 10 minutes before this hits TechCrunch

The lesson jasonhoffman could learn:

If you have a small set of users who bought lifetime accounts to bet on a company you founded than even with new company I would bend over backwards to make sure their needs are met as a thank you.

Otherwise some gets the bright idea to put up a joynet sucks web page with proper Google approved SEO and makes this little PR bump a big EFFING MOUNTAIN!'

jasonhoffman, I imagine you have less than 12 hours before that happens..as TechCrunch may do it for 'free'..:)

There seems to be some confusion in this thread about the difference between "free" and "paid for in advance".

Cutco will re-sharpen your knives for free, no matter how old they are, even if you bought them on eBay, because they made a 'lifetime resharpening' promise with the original purchase. And they're basically a multi-level marketing scam.

It sucks that your hosting is down, but this is a pretty malicious use of HN considering you paid $200 over 6 years ago for lifetime hosting. Less than $3 per month by now. What SLA were you guaranteed?

The lesson for service hosts, NEVER offer lifetime anything.

I'm sure I'll get down-modded for saying this, but on WHT people will tell you that you get what you pay for, which is in stark contrast with what most people here are saying (lack of gratitude for being a charter customer, etc).

Sure, you paid $200. But if you've been a customer since 2007 then you've basically paid the same price as any cheap shared hosting provider. Contrast this experience with Layered Technologies that ran three price hikes and then when I still didn't leave the server I had with them essentially told me to fuck off once their harddrive failed.

At least jasonhoffman had the courtesy to tell people their best option is to switch servers to avoid trouble.

But, like they say, you get what you pay for. If lifetime support and stability is what you'll come to expect, don't pay bottom dollar prices up front.

Disclaimer: I am not a Joyent customer in any way.

FOR JASONHOFFMAN

I see you posting quite a bit here...you keep saying the same thing: "take the free upgrade that is being offered".

There also seems to be quite a few old textdrive lifetime members here.

Perhaps the best approach would be for you to outline the steps for those textdrive folks to migrate off of those servers and take the free upgrade you are offering. I personally have no idea how...so if you could explain it, give a link or some concrete information it would be helpful.

I for one would be happy to migrate if it means better servers, I just need to know how...I'm sure I'm not alone.

Is there any time that Mr. Hoffman's going to call it quits on this thread and actually take it offline in an attempt to resolve the OP's issues?!

Frankly, the tone of most of his comments have been borderline denigrating and it's doing nothing but adding nuisance value to the thread.

You get what you pay for.

This isn't a glib statement. A business transaction is about more than coming to agreement about the price of a thing or service. It's also about creating and maintaining incentives for both sides.

I pay slicehost for a VPS. They get $50/month from me in return for disk space, CPU cycles, uptime and support. Our incentives are aligned.

With Joyent/Textdrive, every month you get hosting and every month they get nothing. The incentives are not aligned. In fact, from Joyent's perspective, the incentive to provide any meaningful service diminishes over time. No about of cajoling or complaining or threatening Joyent will change this imbalance. Sure, it's 54 hours of downtime today - but I can guarantee that a year from now the outages will be far longer and far more frequent.

"But we had a deal!" Yes, you did. And you were a fool to enter into it.

Here's the bottom line:

Your customers don't care what's causing the downtime. It's still your fault.

Website users don't care that the deal has soured. It's still your responsibility.

Joyent doesn't care that they're providing cr@ppy service to Textdrive users, despite the postings on HN by Jason Hoffman (hey Jason, instead of wasting time posting on some internet forum, why not spend that time fixing the actual problem?)

Seriously - Joyent doesn't give a sh?t about the lifetime accounts. If they did, then why are you experiencing 54 hours of downtime? If they do care, and are applying resources to solve the problem, then why is it taking so long? 54 HOURS TO FIX A SERVER. That, to me, is evidence of a shocking level of incompetence. In either case I would get the hell out of there.

Frankly, I'm surprised you are still on there. I too was an original VC and I left years ago due to the support failings.

Look, we were investors in the truest sense. TextDrive was this revolutionary new shared hosting platform with a lot of promise (flexibility, no overselling, etc). Problem was that shared hosting is a commodity with no profit margins. Since TextDrive was started by people who want to build cool shit, rather than people who knew anything about operations in a customer service industry, the result is a massive series of pivots that left us out in the cold.

I'm not making excuses for anyone here, personally I think Jason Hoffman spent way too much time in the forum sucking up the love, and not enough time figuring out how to run a support operation. So he burnt his bridge with me as a customer. I won't touch Joyent with a ten foot pole no matter how good it is.

But here's the thing: that was their bridge to burn.

It doesn't matter what 200 early customers think, because those 200 one-time payments were not going to build a successful company. The bottom line is that the market for a "premium" shared hosting service got squeezed by commodity hosting on one side, and VPSes on the other. Even if they had managed reasonable uptime (which they didn't because they totally underestimated the technical cost of giving people the freedom they did), it still would have been a doomed market, because VPSes got so cheap anyway. We can complain about what a bad deal we got, but it doesn't change the fact that the last salary we paid was in 2005, and the hosting world has moved on. They did what they had to.

I've had a very bad experience with Joyent. Abysmal performance, tech support in denial in spite of obvious tests. Just leave, your life will be better.

Digging Techcrunch got me this story: Twitter and Joyent splits (Circa Jan 31, 2008)

http://techcrunch.com/2008/01/31/twitter-and-joyent-split-am...

Twitter moved to Verio and here's Biz Stone's reply to Techcrunch:

We’re still very much engaged in our efforts to bring solid reliability to Twitter. Achieving our goals is a sustained effort, not an overnight fix. Performance is our most important measure of success and we appreciate both the patience and frustration folks are sharing with us.

With regard to discussing technical specifics about last night’s efforts, we’ll be more keen to do that once we have a chance to come up for air and cover it with some perspective.

You must be on HOWE too. I am in the same boat - unhappy. send a tweet to CEO David Young @davidpaulyoung. (from @snapplez)

joyent is enterprise grade and doesnt have this sort of downtime. its probably a break in your app.