Is Joyent any good? I was one of the original "VC"s on TextDrive where they sold a lifetime account for $400 back in '04. For the two years I tried to use that account there was a never ending string of technical problems that was swept under the rug by a rabid fanboy contingent in the forums. It left such a bad taste in my mouth that even today I doubt their technical competence even though their platform is completely different.
We've been using their Smart Javascript Platform (based on SpiderMonkey) for the past year. They are supposed to be migrating that platform to Node.js soon. The last outage we had was 236 days ago. Our current uptime for the past year is 99.968%. We also began using Smart Machines 3 months ago in Emeryville, CA and Andover, MA data centers and so far have 99.999% availability on those.
The early days (I remember you!) were pretty rough, yeah. Since they switched everything to Solaris, though, it's all been seemingly rock-solid. Only thing is that I really don't use that big lifetime VPS I have with them (still use the shared-hosting account for some static file stuff and side projects though), because I hate adminning Solaris... :(
"Good" is subjective. I've had a 1GB accelerator with them basically forever. Here are a few points.
1. Their pricing is absurdly high, as cloud providers go. They are roughly double for equivalent* offerings.
* = "equivalent" is tough to qualify, since hardly anybody offers solaris zones.
2. They don't seem to have much interest in migrating exiting customers over to their "my joyent" self-provisioning system.
3. They have been delivering 100% availability since I've been with them, which is going on 3 years now. I've never experienced this with any other provider, ever.
4. Performance is better than I would have expected.
