Jason Hoffman of Joyent has written an interesting article, Why EC2 isn’t yet a platform for “normal” web applications.

1. No IP address persistence (they all function as DHCP clients and are assigned an IP). One has to use dynamic DNS services for a given domain.
2. No block storage persistence. When the instance is gone, the data is gone. Yes I know you can send this back regularly to S3, but isn’t that actually a ‘hack’?
3. No opportunity for hardware-based load balancing (which happens to be the key to scaling a process based framework like Rails and mentioned above).
4. No vertical scaling (you get a 1.7Ghz CPU and 1 GB of RAM, that’s it). So like the block storage problem, this hits databases, we run about 32GB of ours in memory.
5. Can’t run your own kernel or make kernel modifications so there’s no ability for kernel and OS optimizations, and no guarantee that they’ve been done.
6. Images have to be uploaded and then moved around their network to find a launching point. This can take several minutes, if not more. Move 100 GBs around a busy gigabit network sometime and see.

Didn’t I just talk about life-time hosting plans last week, and used TextDrive/Joyent as a pioneer example? They have just released the new VC200 — Life-time Accelerator Plans! For only $799 out-right, you can buy a small Solaris container with 256MB RAM, 5GB NAS storage on the Thumper and 15GB/month data transfer. You’ll be in front within 18 months!

Even better — if you are an existing life-time plan holder, you get to pay only half the price ($399 for a small life-time Solaris container) AND keep your existing shared hosting with TextDrive as well! However, there will only be 200 slots available. My Solaris skill is pretty rusty (last used one — 2000), otherwise I will be very tempted.

Now, the mic is over to you, Mr. SliceMatt. What do you think? :)

The fine guys at Joyent has come out with a podcast of their own — ps pipe grep, with a tag line surveying all the processes.

160kbps MP3 for a podcast is a bit unnecessary, and I don’t really like their choice of music. However they scores in the category of geekiness. Stuff talked about in the first episode — virtualization, Oracle vs. Red Hat, Sun’s Blackbox, Ruby on Rails and Java — reflecting the expertise in Joyent as both a software developer and hosting company.

Joyent, the company behind the developer-centric hosting service TextDrive, has released a new product — Bingo! on-line disk service.

Joyent’s new Bingo! on-line disk service gives you 100 gigabytes of disk storage on Sun’s amazing X4500 platform with 10 gigabytes of bandwidth per month over WebDAV for the super-low price of $199 a year! You get one user account and the ability to serve files from a public folder (for images, podcasts, whatever). On top of this, you get a complimentary 5-user subscription to Connector, Joyent’s amazing group collaboration product.