I never really know what I should expect from shared hosting, it’s all Random A$# Shared Hosting (RASH), but this still pained me.

I emailed Joyent support yesterday:

“Regarding http://help.joyent.com/index.php?pg=forums.posts&id=942&pc=2 why is there no final resolution on that thread? Why did it take ~ 31 hours to resolve this issue? What is being done to prevent this issue in the future?

It’s also upsetting when an issue is downplayed as “performance issues” or “slowness”. I couldn’t publish content to my site at all for over a day and a half, and Google Analytics show that few visitors made it to my site those days and those that made it might be thanks to the front end content delivery network CloudFlare.”

The response only made me feel a little better:

“The why didn’t it get updated would be my fault as I didn’t post when the resilver finished.

The why it took 31 hours, is that is how long the resliver process took (minus the losing 5 hours on the first replacement drive failed and had to be replaced a second time)

Sorry about the issue.”

I know I’m a bottom tier customer, and it was a long time ago that Joyent was really in the shared hosting business, but I still imagined them being able to resolve almost any problem within a handful of hours.

It’s worth noting that Joyent has been pretty good to me these past 5 years.

host-tracker.com free 30 minute interval:
2011 :ast week uptime:78.40% Downtime:1 day(s) 7 hour(s)
2010: Yearly uptime: 99.96% Downtime:2 hour(s) 52 min(s)
2009: Yearly uptime: 99.71% Downtime:6 hour(s) 31 min(s) – started monitoring only 2009-03

2008: The first half of 2008 was a dark year on textdrive, and I whined to some people I knew at Joyent back then.
2006-2007: was OK on textdrive.

Recommended by friends in the open source community, I’ve hosted this site and a few other low traffic sites for friends with TextDrive since near the end of 2005. TextDrive and Joyent became one around the same time.

The TextDrive shared hosting experience has been good, but I also don’t generally expect much from shared hosting. I’m optimistic about this cloud computing thang though.

Photo by Aaron Schmidt.