When I wrote about the Morph Application Platform on Tuesday, I carelessly tossed off a reference to my mixed experience with Rails hosting at TextDrive, now called Joyent. Kristie Wells of Joyent asked me to clarify my experience privately, and has since given me permission to post our exchange.

Here's my clarification:

Kristie, you asked about my TextDrive hosting experience. It was for [name removed], in 2006. My name didn't appear on the account, but I supervised the software development. I'm no longer associated with those thieves.

The deployment was successful, but lengthy and painful. I realize that the hosting account was dirt cheap, but we had to fight multiple issues: needing a lighttpd instance and port for Rails, needing to integrate that with Apache, needing to set up the user control mechanisms, needing to set up secure developer access. The fact that my background was heavily slanted towards Windows didn't help. TextDrive support was ultimately helpful, but not exactly super-responsive at the time.

Kristie responded:

Hi Martin, 

Thank you for clarifying.  The post made your experience sound current, which concerned me greatly.

Joyent has changed, a lot, over the last two years. We recently launched a new shared hosting environment on our Accelerators as we are moving away from the BSD servers that were far from happy. Things have been streaming along nicely since that change took place. You know, just FYI, in case you ever wanted to give us a lookie again.

Thank you again for your response.

Be well.

Cheers,

Kristie Wells
VP, Customer Advocacy

Posted by Martin Heller on May 7, 2008 11:55 AM