

Countdown to Knockout: Post 11 - Deploying to Joyent - bensummers
http://nodeknockout.posterous.com/countdown-to-knockout-post-11-deploying-to-jo

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grandalf
I'd caution everyone about using Joyent. I company I work with used them for
hosting (spent thousands on Accelerators) and had horrible IO. Clearly some
other client was using all the disk IO related performance issues, yet their
tech support claimed it was working properly. Note, this was all on Joyent's
"new" architecture which was supposed to prevent these problems.

Joyent's tech support was arrogant, annoyed, and unhelpful. Caveat Emptor.

Bottom line was that Joyent thought that because it was using Solaris it could
massively overload the number of zones per box. This was generally OK for CPU
and memory sharing, but for disk IO it simply didn't scale well enough, yet
Joyent's entire business model (and pricing) was based on the idea that you
could squeeze a lot of zones onto one large box.

Example: Typing ls at the console would lag horribly, sometimes taking 3-4
seconds to return. Other times it would be lightning fast, and was thus
declared a non-issue.

Heroku, on the other hand, has been fantastic. They even have responsive,
helpful people on IRC most of the time.

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icey
Ryan Dahl works for Joyent, so I would assume they have a pretty good feel for
how to run Node apps there.

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grandalf
There are surely a lot of very smart people there, but the ones I worked with
had all drunk the kool-ade that Raid 10 on 15K spindles with ZFS was so
_awesome_ that there couldn't be IO problems.

When you have a company that is using technology that is essentially beta
(like ZFS) and you have to pay large amounts of money to Sun every time you
need support, that creates an incentive to pretend the problem doesn't exist.
Joyent also showed some signs of serious cash flow issues (half off if you
sign up for a year) which may explain why they couldn't pay Sun enough money
to identify and/or address the issues.

Note: Switching the app that I mentioned to a $100/month slice (off of a
$400/month zone) resulted in a massive speedup and noticeably faster disk IO,
db performance, etc.

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danw
I presume you mean "Heroku", who already do node.js
[http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2010/4/28/node_js_support_ex...](http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2010/4/28/node_js_support_experimental/)

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nestlequ1k
Yeah, but without the limitations.

\- Latest version of node installed (and ability to choose node version)

\- You get an IP Address

\- You can use websockets and persistent connections

\- No 64 concurrent connection limit

\- You can actually use NPM and dont have to vendor everything

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franck
I love that you get benefits of both PaaS and VPS hosting combined.

\- Easy deployment via git push, on a pre-configured stack.

\- Freedom of installing/configuring anything via SSH access to your server,
if you ever need to customize it.

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Kilimanjaro
Err, how to get a coupon? (besides joining node KO which is closed now)

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pyronicide
I'd really like to give it a spin as well (and didn't join node KO).

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smoody
Are they providing a data persistence solution as part of their stack?

