Dear Joyent

Dec 31, 03:54 PM by Eric Allen

Dear Joyent,
I really can’t believe how much you guys have lost your edge. It seems like just last year you were top dog in Rails hosting. Speaking of which, what happened to that awesome Rails hosting site you acquired? Whatever, I’m sure you’ve been working on more important stuff like….oh wait, what? I really want to believe you are busy on things that will improve the experience of your customers, but I haven’t seen anything in the last few years. Heck, I know somebody who just finished migrating from the old FreeBSD system last week! Didn’t that migration start over two years ago?

How can you possibly have let something like Engine Yard happen to you?? Here you are, top dog in Rails hosting, lots of great press, great server farm, good service, and these whipper snappers eat your lunch? Heck, what kind of edge have you got on Slicehost anymore? I know, I know, you’re doing a lot more than Rails…like, uh, hosting people’s Wordpress blogs? Come on, how card can that be? Your shiny Virtualmin is sluggish as all get out, and setting up mongrels still isn’t particularly easy.

I guess I should probably just shut up. I’m one of those pesky freeloaders who committed $500 up front to get in while things were getting going. Yeah, I had definitely planned on getting more features out of Joyent as time went on, but it’s been a few years and the $500 has probably paid itself off. I’m just a cost to you. But even if I’d gone and gotten a shiny Accelerator, I still wouldn’t be any better off. I’m writing not because I need the features (my next Rails app will probably end up on Engine Yard), I’m writing because I care about you guys. I loved having the personal touch in the forums back in the day, and I feel like Joyent has taken good care of me despite the lack of new things. I wish you the best of luck as a company, and I hope to be proven wrong!

  1. I feel ya.

    If there blog, joyeur.com, has been crazy quite this past year.

    I’ve also given up on them.


    — Teddy K    Jan 3, 07:30 PM    #

  2. I also ponied up for one of the VC rounds, and you echo my thoughts exactly, though I gave up on them years ago.

    Bottom line is they’ve never delivered anything I’d consider reliable enough even for my personal site, much less a client site. I used to believe their hollow promises, but it’s now clear that they’ve never been interested in customer service or the fundamentals of a solid hosting business. It’s sort of fun to drink their koolaid in a sadomasochistic way. They’ve always got all this brilliant new technology just around the corner. The problem is half of it is eternal vapor, and the rest never makes it past alpha quality.

    Contrast with EngineYard, a company who responds to every ticket within minutes, and will solve any problem you throw at them around the clock with a diverse team of Rails/Linux/DB experts stationed around the world.


    — Gabe    Jan 3, 09:38 PM    #

  3. I also gave up on Joyent – moved my hosting to Amazon AWS. Solaris isn’t cut out for bleeding edge Web development.


    — Joshua S    Jan 4, 02:33 AM    #

  4. Hi Eric,

    Let me introduce myself.

    My name is Rod Boothby. I head up the Evangelism team at Joyent.

    Joyent has been doing some tremendously powerful things with rails. Check out this video: http://www.joyent.com/a/scale-rails-to-1-billion-pageviews

    The largest Rails application in the world runs on Joyent.

    The hard business of scaling Rails or any application to billions of page views is not always as sexy as “press a button to start a mongrel”, but it gives our clients what they need: Joyent delivers true scale on demand.

    - Rod


    — Rod    Jan 4, 03:08 PM    #

  5. engine yard is pretty bad in my experience. They are much more expensive than other options and you don’t get anythign for that money other than their techs causing your site to go down whenever they do simple things.

    Some examples, I had to degug their cap files because they were broken, yet this is one of the things they say they are good at. Another example, they didn’t have monit and memcached configured properly and our site would crash whenever we deployed because memcached wouldn’t restart. Another example, they turned of the mongrels on one of our slices but didn’t tell the load balancer to stop sending requests to that slice.

    I can go on and on, but this was my experience being at EY for about 6 months. We moved off and are saving a lot of money.


    — reck    Jan 4, 03:35 PM    #

  6. Hello Eric. Thanks for the kind words about Engine Yard. Please feel free to contact me directly if there’s anything I can do to help get you going. I can promise that we’ll do everything we can to avoid a repeat of Reck’s experience.

    Reck, I want to personally say “I’m sorry” for the experience you had.

    As a founder of Engine Yard, I may have already expressed this to you directly, but I wanted to be certain that you know that your experience is atypical, though unfortunately not unheard of, in our over two years of hosting. Gabe’s experience is more common and certainly more in line with our expectations of the service quality we intend to deliver to each and every customer.

    May I ask when you were a customer? I’d like to make sure that you’re talking about past experiences, and not something very recent.

    Thanks and, again, sorry for your unfortunate experience. :-(


    — Tom Mornini    Jan 6, 09:47 PM    #