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Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

#111

Post by itsnotvalid »

officemonkey wrote: post #65
swombat wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like the OP is getting the service for free anyway...

It wasn't "free". We bought a "lifetime" package. I don't recall the details, but I ponied up a couple hundred dollars at a time when we didn't know textdrive was going to make it. I don't expect a lot of support, but I do expect uptime and courtesy.

Oh I see... then, I just wonder how they could eat up for life-time subscriptions for so long. After some Google searches, I've found that those plans are one off, and seems to cost $799 to sign up (http://hostingfu.com/article/joyent-lifetime-accelerator). If the terms was not changed, it now cost $25 a month on JoyentCloud to have the same thing with the SLA I mentioned. So it takes 31 years to compensate the cost of the $799 lifetime subscription to pay off. But the fact is that now they have "10 TB Monthly Bandwidth" (or unlimited depending on which web page you are looking at), I am just blindly guessing that lifetime users would get that too, right?

Re: Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

#113

Post by zackola »

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…

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.

Re: Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

#114

Post by tylerritchie »

jasonhoffman wrote: post #26
frankwiles wrote: post #16

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…

If you're on an old textdrive server, then you need to move, like we've been saying.

As an upgrader to mixed grill, I agree. I moved and I've been happy. I assume at some point I'll be asked to move again from the shared smart machines as they currently exist (which, as near as I can tell, are identical to the shared accelerators), and I'm cool with that.

But because you (Jason) appear to be actively monitoring this thread, I'm going to make a suggestion:

E-mail everyone on the old BSD textdrive servers and tell them that they really should migrate.

Tell the month-to-month customers that you're end-of-lifing that product and on February 29th of 2012 (because nothing ever happens on Feb 29th) it will no longer be there. If you like, offer them whatever account is similar to the one they're on with a 50% discount 1 year discount if they take you up on it in the next month, 25% the three months following that and 10% up to the 29th.

For the VC customers just tell it how it is. You will continue to support the systems for however long you need to, but the newer stuff is just better. You appreciate their trust in your company etc. but they will probably be happier with the shinier stuff if they migrate.

Then follow up every couple of months with another e-mail. You could even make it interesting and say what percentage of VCs have migrated, what cool new stuff is available to those who have moved etc. (though if you do that, I'd like to receive those e-mails too).

If you want to incentivize the move for the stragglers, go ahead, their bitching pisses me off anyway and if you can get them to move and STFU by offering them something I didn't get, that's fine by me.

But most importantly send an e-mail. Don't post on the forum, or on the blog, or the wiki. I know that the forum, RSS feeds and blog are how Joyent likes to communicate but e-mail goes into my inbox. If I don't pay attention to it I'm the only one to blame.

If two or three years down the line people still haven't migrated. EOL the BSD servers. I'm pretty confident the "lifetime" I paid for was for lifetime of hosting with particular storage, server access, and bandwidth levels, not lifetime of hosting on a single machine with a particular OS. I could be wrong, but I think it's reasonable to assume that your hosting provider will change technologies as time progresses. I also am happy if they keep on giving me higher quality service with no reoccurring fees.

Re: Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

#115

Post by jacques_chester »

dotBen wrote: post #110
jacques_chester wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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/ 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.

It adds ~50ms to move to Dallas. That might be worth it, actually, it's not as though I'm hosting an HFT platform.

Re: Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

#117

Post by payingcust »

I will be moving from joyent. I am paying 15usd per month and have not been told to migrate. now I read the founder saying it's my fault that I am suffering so much downtime because I should have searched the forums and migrated years ago. Well I am going to migrate now.

Re: Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

#118

Post by prodigal_erik »

dp111 wrote: post #116

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

http://help.joyent.com/index.php?pg=forums.posts&id=949&... acknowledges it's a real outage and talks of rebuilding the server after a significant hardware failure from two days ago, which implies they didn't have a disaster recovery plan.

Re: Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

#119

Post by patrickgzill »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #118
dp111 wrote: post #116

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

http://help.joyent.com/index.php?pg=forums.posts&id=949&... acknowledges it's a real outage and talks of rebuilding the server after a significant hardware failure from two days ago, which implies they didn't have a disaster recovery plan.

Good catch; I just wonder how it can take more than 2 days, when you already have a bunch of employees as well as equipment and presumably spares, to build a replacement FreeBSD server and transfer data?

Re: Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime

#120

Post by boredzo »

boredzo wrote: post #95
jasonhoffman wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is correct. We've been offering upgrades to newer stuff. You just need to contact support.

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 a…

Ah-ha! Looking at the front page of their (apparently new) wiki, I found a link to the old wiki:

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

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.

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