Why Joyent Is So Much Better Than Hostway

I made an unfortunate decision a 5+ years ago to host a website with Hostway. Due to some issues somewhat beyond my control, it has been very difficult to move away from them.

Hostway isnt the worst host I’ve ever used, but there are a lot of things they do wrong, that a much better host, Joyent (who hosts this blog) does much better.

Status Reports

Joyent has an RSS feed which alerts me to server outages. Although it is not perfect, due to a brief delay between when there is a problem, and when it is reported, it is nice to be able to go somewhere.

Hostway, on the other hand, has absolutely NOTHING. There is no server status feed. If I am experiencing a problem, I have to get on the phone to find out if the problem is with just me, or with the whole server. This doesn’t work, because if there is a problem, then EVERY client calls them up at the same time and hold times become unbearable.

Considering how pitifully easy it is to create a blog, it is pretty much inexcusable for a web host not to have a status blog of some sort. Just a place to put a message like “sorry guys, the database server crashed and is being rebooted”.

User Forums

Joyent has user forums. This is an incredible resource. It easily replaces those “knowledge base” lists that never seem to have what you are looking for. When there is a server problem, you can usually jump on to the discussion board and see that other people are experiencing the same thing.

There is nothing like this for Hostway. Their knowledge base is particularly paltry, and their user manual is a complete waste of time. A user forum would go a very long way towards easing some of the frustration of outages.

I could go on and on, but it really is these two features that makes Joyent such a better shared hosting solution.

Wednesday June 11, 2008