Joyent: Joy at Last

Back in the days of Textdrive I took a small gamble and bought one of their ‘limited offer’ Mixed Grill lifetime hosting accounts for $500. At the time in the Blogosphere opinion was divided about the wisdom of these products. And certainly, while the included online Strongspace backup storage was truly useful, the web hosting accounts were slow and unreliable, despite (because of) all the cool software options.

Maybe I was driven by some deep-seated anxiety about the future. Maybe it was watching the Bourne Identity – Jason Bourne the web developer hauled out of the sea with nothing but a Textdrive username encoded in a chip on his neck. I was hooked on the promise of my own server space for life. So in February of this year I stumped up another $500 upgraded to the larger, ‘business class’ ’3 Martini Lunch’ lifetime account.

Things weren’t looking good. My shared hosting space was still horribly unrelible and the supposed upgrade to a ‘business level’ server was put on hold due to Textdrive (now rebranded as Joyent) plans to completely rebuild their entire architecture on Solaris. They promised us a much better future: distributed hosting based on virtual ‘accelerators’ that allowed for bursts of extra performance when needed. But those deadlines kept slipping. We would have them by March, they said… but the summer came and went and I was still on the old server, $500 poorer.

Then last week my patience paid off. An email from Joyent and my own shiny new Premier Joyent account: 50 websites, 20GB of space, on a super new Shared Accelerator. At a normal cost of $100 per month, this is mine forever, with nothing more to pay (and server specs guaranteed to keep growing inline with future technology). I know it says ‘lifetime’ account, but I’m thinking about handing this onto my children when I’m gone.