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

joyent.com

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

#81

Post by wisty »

lolwutreddit wrote: post #45

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…

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".

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

#82

Post by anonymouz »

xentronium wrote: post #75
anonymouz wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that I have no more trust into them honoring an agreement. I'd very much like to keep my lifetime account (I rarely use it for anything, but when I need it, it's there, it's paid for and I can just use it). Problem is, the new Textdrive was essentially launched out of trying to avert this PR debacle, and neither Joyent nor Textdrive have published any information on how this endeavor is funded or suppo…

> I have no simply no trust left that this will go well (which is why wanted to take the refund). Hindsight is 20/20, but lifetime service claim sounds too good to be true anyway. Besides, was that 5-6 years of hosting for $500?

It seems quite reasonable when you consider that they used the money to bootstrap their operations: Take some money upfront to buy the servers, and in exchange host a bunch of people for free, covering the operating costs from other income.

It was ~6 years in total duration for me (though used on and off). I recognize that buying monthly hosting for an entirety of 6 years is not cheaper, but it's not what I bought.

I paid the money upfront, knowing fully well that I would not use it continuously, to have a hassle free way to throw up some small stuff if I need it. Others often seem to have similar use cases (or hosting small websites for local community organizations and similar).

I think everybody also recognized that there is a risk the company may go bankrupt, and we're out of hosting, but what's actually happened is that they simply wanted to stop offering the service.

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

#83

Post by rplnt »

kami8845 wrote: post #41
smcl wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, same for me. Delicious irony in my opinion

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.

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).

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

#84

Post by morganh »

xentronium wrote: post #75
anonymouz wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that I have no more trust into them honoring an agreement. I'd very much like to keep my lifetime account (I rarely use it for anything, but when I need it, it's there, it's paid for and I can just use it). Problem is, the new Textdrive was essentially launched out of trying to avert this PR debacle, and neither Joyent nor Textdrive have published any information on how this endeavor is funded or suppo…

> I have no simply no trust left that this will go well (which is why wanted to take the refund). Hindsight is 20/20, but lifetime service claim sounds too good to be true anyway. Besides, was that 5-6 years of hosting for $500?

>Besides, was that 5-6 years of hosting for $500?

And how is this any good? 5-6 years of hosting for $500 is $100 per year. Costlier that other hosting arrangements, even better performing than Joyent.

And "lifetime" is "lifetime". If the company went down, that would have been another thing, but as it is they should have honoured their deal, even if it "sounds too good to be true".

Oh, and deals that "sound too good to be true" is the province of snake-oil salesmen and crooks, not of hosting providers you want your business to depend off.

You just make half of the conclusion ("the buyer should have been more careful") and forget the other part: "the seller was a crook".

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

#86

Post by Jare »

benologist wrote: post #55
kami8845 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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!

In the professional tech world, not ALL exposure is good exposure. With this post they look like immature kids, and then when their post and entire site goes down, they look incompetent in front of the very people they want to convince.

An informative post explaining the hardships of uptime and reliability in simple words, and how they do their best to keep adding 9's, would have been so much better.

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

#89

Post by dspillett »

xentronium wrote: post #74
irahul wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Red herring. Here is a company with a history of making tall claims and then doing an 180. How is pointing that out a red herring? > Besides, as far as I understand, Textdrive is in the process of being relaunched, honoring all the lifetime plans. From what I know of the story, if they do honor lifetime plans, it isn't out of the goodness of their hearts. They had every intention of flipping the lifetime planholder…

> Here is a company with a history of making tall claims and then doing an 180. How is pointing that out a red herring? That isn't particularly relevant to service quality and stability, is it? Maybe it's just me, but I try not to pay much attention to PR bullshit, since they have to make bold claims in order to succeed. p.s. that their blog was down for the last three hours is somewhat ironic, though.

> > Here is a company with a history of making tall claims and then doing an 180. How is pointing that out a red herring?

> That isn't particularly relevant to service quality and stability, is it?

Not from a technical aspect, no. But it is a very important consideration when looking into any service level agreement that they offer to back up the technical claims. If something goes wrong, will they walk away from the promises made in such an SLA as easily as they thought they could walk away from the lifetime accounts? Unlikely I'm sure, but certainly not impossible and the lifetime thing sets a precedent that is difficult to completely ignore especially if you are talking about the sort of money Reddit must spend on hosting related matters.

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

#90

Post by sgt »

codemac wrote: post #37
wisty wrote: post #16

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…

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 probab…

Personally I like Joyent - they've been very helpful to me, they support the community, they're a pretty cool company if I may say so.

And I don't see anything wrong with what Joyent did regarding their Reddit-commentary. It just shows that they are playful engineers with a sense of humor, that's all.

PS I think SmartOS is great.

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