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Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

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Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

#1

Post by enduser »

I am a customer of Joyent.

For the past two days, the server on which I host some customer websites and mail servers has been down. I did not receive any warning or explanation by email or telephone. When I filed a support ticket, I was given a link to their help site with some status updates.

Status updates (paraphrased):

2011-02-26 09:22:19 GMT: server offline

2011-02-26 14:38:38 GMT: no ETA

2011-02-26 17:09:42 GMT: estimated downtime 12+ hours

2011-02-27 22:23:08 GMT: estimated downtime 20+ hours

That final estimate of 20+ hours is in addition to what is now 37 hours of downtime. Joyent has offered no reparation or backup service (e.g. backup MX service to keep mail from bouncing).

For your consideration when choosing hosting providers.

Re: Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

#4

Post by asuth »

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.

Re: Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

#5

Post by kylecordes »

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.

Re: Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

#6

Post by iskander »

kylecordes wrote: post #5

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 leg…

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.

Re: Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

#7

Post by jsdalton »

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.

Re: Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

#8

Post by thedeuce »

kylecordes wrote: post #5

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 leg…

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

Re: Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

#9

Post by thedeuce »

kylecordes wrote: post #5

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 leg…

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

Re: Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

#10

Post by itsnotvalid »

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.

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