Thread

Hi all,

Does anyone here have experience hosting with Joyent Accelerators?  I’m looking for a cost effective and scalable architecture, and their offering seems to catch my eye.  To start we are looking to set up a single VPS image (either 256MB or 512MB), but want the power to quickly scale out and up as our user base grows.  Also, we are looking at options to serve our static content from a CDN.  We plan to use S3 initially and then sign with a true CDN once we have a grasp on our demand.  Does anyone have any suggestions in the way of a solid and competitively priced CDN (currently we are considering Voxel)?

Thanks.

Your post just caught my eye and I thought I’d mention the Mosso cloud.  I haven’t had personal experience with it so I can’t say much, just that I like what they offer.

Thanks for the reply.  We’ve had a quick look at Mosso and it is very far from meeting our requirements.  That being said, does anyone have any feedback on the Joyent Accelerators?

They look good, very similar to EC2 but wit half the cost. Shame I have had no experience of them.

Yes, I have an Accelerator and their shared hosting is actually on Accelerators as well though of course you don’t have root access to the shared accounts.

With the Accelerators you have two elements that you are dealing with which is different than other providers.  There is Joyent, the company running the service and you have Solaris which is the OS behind the Accelerators.

Solaris:

Pro: Solaris is probably the best OS to run as a server.  Solaris has lots of cool stuff that Linux doesn’t like ZFS.

Con: You have to learn Solaris.  Even just moving from one Linux distro to another is a PITA because you have to learn all the quirks of the distro, where the resources are, how to get help from the community, how the packaging system works and the list goes on.  Solaris is taking that “PITAness” up another notch.  Things like the packaging system gets better all the time but like   most other things in Solaris land the user friendliness has not quite caught up to Linux. 

Personally, I feel that Linux is good enough.

Joyent:

Pro: Generally a great company, easy to communicate with and a great community.

Con: They don’t have the control panels that other hosts such as Slicehost has.  Things that are simple and automated with other hosts require a ticket with Joyent.  These things include tasks such as reinstalling the OS, creating a new Accelerator, upgrades, etc.

Other thoughts…

I like how Joyent allows great vertical and horizontal scaling.  Some VPS providers can only take you so far before you would have to move on to another provider.  Joyent can handle you from A to Z.

Prices are pretty good, last I checked they allow unlimited bandwidth.

I prefer Slicehost.  I just don’t use my Accelerator much because switching between Solaris and Ubuntu annoys me.

Hope that helps!

Hi John.

Thanks for the response.  We actually have been trying to decide between Joyent and Slicehost.  I am not really familiar with Solaris and didn’t know it was such a bitch, but to be honest, really all we will need to do is set up Apache, MySQL, PHP, SVN and maybe memcache (could it really be that much of a pita to set those up?)- mail will be outsourced because we are not fing with that headache.  Both services seem to have their highs and lows.  We like the freedom of Slicehost, but it seems like Joyent offers more power - at least in theory (95% bursting on 8 core servers and 10TB bandwidth/month).  Also, it seems that in terms of customer support and community, Joyent has the edge.  It’s pretty cheap to get started with both, so I think I’m going to set up some instances and give them each a test drive.

BTW, have you ever scaled out with Slicehost?  When adding slices, is it possible to ensure that they are on separate boxes so you can create a truly redundant infrastructure?  Also, how long does it take to get a new slice running?  In addition, if you have scaled up, how long does it take to allocate the resources?  What happens if I want to scale a slice up and the box it is on is already at capacity?  Sorry if I’m bombarding you with questions.  I find it is best to hear answers from both real customers and the sales team.

Solaris: 
If you need to learn it then you will.  Most people are familiar with Linux and not Solaris, so it takes a little more time and it is a little more annoying.  Even more annoying is that you cannot hit the “start over” button if you decide you want to wipe all your screw-ups and start from scratch when setting up a new box (requires a ticket.)  Everything you list except for memcache is ready to go with a new account.  Slicehost gives you a fresh slate with nothing but the basic OS setup.

Mail:
Heh, I use the Joyent mail servers, even with my Slicehost boxes.

Freedom:
Slicehost has improved scalability options since they added the option for a VPS with 4 GB of RAM.  Before they did that I would have suggested Joyent without hesitation for scalability needs.  You can still go even bigger with Joyent though.  One other important consideration is that Joyent gives you the option of running hardware load balancers.  Joyent wins here.

Customer support and community:
I love the Slicehost customer support and community as much as the Joyent counterparts.  They are very similar as they both started out as services for geeks and developers with tight knit communities.  I found out about Slicehost through the Joyent community and many Joyeurs are there too.  In fact, one of the Slicehost developers is/was? a long time Joyent user.  Ultimately I believe Slicehost might have a slight edge due to the control panel tools (restart, rescue, backup, slice creation etc.)

Other notes on Slicehost:
I have never had to do major scaling with Slicehost.  However, I do have a site that started out on a 256 slice then went to 512 and finally 1 GB within the span of a couple of days.  Upgrading is done in minutes with near zero downtime (maybe a few seconds but I never noticed.)  The box was running at capacity but because it was so overloaded I never noticed degradation during the upgrade process.  I just breathed a sigh of relief when the upgrade was done.  Everything was smooth after that. 

Slice creation is really smooth.  You can have a new slice running in minutes.  The system will create your account on a different box as your other accounts though I am not sure that is 100% guaranteed.  They are working on getting a new data center up but I am not sure about that status of that.

One other consideration on scaling.  If you need to upgrade a VPS or throw more VPS’ at your scaling problem really fast then Slicehost wins because you can do all this through the control panel without opening a ticket.  Joyent gives you more tools to be better prepared though.

Bonus trivia:
Twitter ran on Joyent not too long ago (last year?)  I’m not sure anyone has commented on why they switched.

Thanks again for the reply.  I know about the Twitter situation.  I don’t think any side either publicly blamed the other, but Twitter did end up firing its CTO, so I’m going to assume that the bulk of their problems were internal.

Cheaply scale by the hour:

https://www.gandi.net/hosting/proposal/

Wow.  That is a very interesting concept.  Too bad their data center is in Europe and they are in beta.  It’s like EC2 but much easier to manage.  If they can build out their infrastructure and create some data centers in the US I’d love to use them.  Also, it would be cool to be easily able to distribute your application among multiple servers located in data centers on different continents.  Virtualization is awesome.  Hope the model succeeds.

I generally stay away from whiz bang new ways to do hosting.  You don’t need for your production application to be a testbed for new hosting ideas.  For instance, Mosso and MT Grid were both disasters when the were first released. 

By the way, after reading your very first post, I noticed that you mentioned images.  Joyent can’t do images but Slicehost can.  You can setup a slice to your preferences, backup the slice and then duplicate that slice with new instances.  There are so many cool things you can do with Slicehost.

I’m pretty sure you can clone an image from a ZFS snapshot, but again I’m not really familiar with Solaris.

FYI, Slicehost just posted this http://www.slicehost.com/articles/2008/8/7/private-ips-for-your-slices so it looks like scale outs will be more efficient.

So I played with Slicehost today and I’m almost sold.  I was able to get a web server and a db server configured and running in a couple of hours and also played around with wiping slices, destroying slices, scaling, and all the other goodies the control panel provides.  It is VERY nice being able to handle all of that without having to contact sales/support.  Also, the price point is very nice.  My only major concern deals with the limits they place on your slices.  Currently 4GB is the max, but you can only get backups with 2GB or less, so I would probably never use the 4GB.  I can always just add more slices, but this means more config which is kind of annoying.  I think I’m going to give them a shot, and hopefully as their company grows they will increase their offerings.