After Joyent’s decision to terminate my lifetime hosting account I had two options: I could stay at Joyent, for 5 years, using a SmartMachine (their Virtual Private Server). Or I could take a refund of my original purchases ($600) and go elsewhere. I decided to go elsewhere.
Right now, I don’t want to be at Joyent. The way that Jason decided to terminate the lifetime hosting, the short time frame he gave us to migrate, and the original promotional offer (just 1 year on a SmartMachine) just rubbed me the wrong way. I had a lot of trust and affection banked for Joyent. But, at least right now, the trust is gone and the affection is greatly diminished.
As I thought about my options, I thought back to all of the negative aspects of hosting with Joyent. I thought back over the number of products that were promised and then failed to materialize. TextDrive was going to have a truly awesome control panel, but it never came. Then there was going to be a next generation statistics system, but that too never came. The Joyent Connector was going to be the future of group webmail, until it rotted on the vine. Shared Accelerators were the future until suddenly they were the past and they stopped selling shared hosting entirely. Accelerators became SmartMachines, and so on.
Joyent’s documentation could be a challenge too. Sometimes things were well documented on Wikis. Sometimes they weren’t. You took your chances. The community was great for figuring things out but, lately, the community just hasn’t been there around Joyent’s SmartMachines. The target customer either knows what they’re doing or can afford to pay for support. Those learning on their own are a bit left out. Then too, Joyent’s communication has always been ad-hoc. We joyeurs found out about many changes, on the forum. There was always a risk that you might miss changes entirely if you stopped participating in the forum.
All in all, I felt that it was time for me to move on. As I thought about my options, I grew increasingly attracted to Linode. I’ve been on a shared, managed hosting server for the past 7 years. But my real dream has always been to have my own server, out on the internet. I’ve always wanted to have a box that I can fully control and configure, to my own design.
Linode gives me that. For just $20 a month, I can have a Virtual Private Server of my very own. I can reboot it, wipe it, re-image it with different operating systems, move it between data centers, clone it, and more. I can install any server software I want and leave out anything that I don’t want. And Linode has great documentation too. Some if it is more basic than I need and some of it is more advanced than I need. That makes for a great foundation for learning and tinkering.
I’m taking a refund of my $600 from Joyent and I’ll be spending it at Linode, over the next couple of years. I can’t wait to get started.