Update on Joyent
So, I have my shiny new Facebook Accelerator. I’m going to run down the good, the bad, and the interesting/different.
The Bad
1. You can’t reimage automatically. Sometimes I like to mess around and just then reimage. This is crappy.
2. Webmin/Virtualmin. They suck. I’d rather just manually do Apache config, user management, etc.
3. Blastwave. It just isn’t up to par when comparing to yum and apt-get.
4. Things seem very custom. Part is Solaris, part is Joyent and it means that you are forced to learn more than you should to get things done.
The Good
1. Webmin/Virtualmin would probably be welcomed by the less server-admin types.
2. Scalable storage. Very nice. Means you don’t have to keep an eye on whether your app starts chewing up GB.
I’m a little conflicted on Joyent (still). They have a good product and the scalable storage (and higher GB RAM server options) make them a better option than Slicehost for something you need to scale up a lot. Of course, how many sites will be handling over 160GB of data? How many sites will need servers with more than 4GB of RAM?
Xen does encounter more overhead than Solaris’ Zones (especially on disk-intensive stuff), but I’ve never had a speed problem on my tiny 256MB Slice (which runs this site).
I’m not sure that I’d give Joyent a ringing endorsement, but they should be in the top 5 hosts you’re looking at.