SubscribeTwitter Joins Us on Verio
January 31, 2008 · Print This Article
Let me start by saying, I'm dropping in on a conversation taking place at Techcrunch, Twitter and on the Joyent blog regarding the continue server outages at Twitter. I use Twitter but have been too busy this past week to even notice their recent round of outages. I found out today they had been hosting with Joyent and last night made the switch to Verio.
We've been a Verio reseller for over 10 years and all our client websites, and our personal sites, are hosted at Verio. A few years back we put some personal sites on a couple servers at TextDrive and everything was fine for a while. Then TextDrive was acquired by Joyent and we started having more and more downtime. It wasn't too much of a problem as these were just personal blogs. But when Beach Walks started taking off, which we initially hosted at TextDrive, we could no longer accept the outages and moved everything off the Joyent servers and terminated all our accounts.
It's a PITA (pain in the ass) managing servers. I've been doing it for 12 years now. We started way back in 1996 hosting all our own servers in our little office in Santa Fe, New Mexico. When the count of servers grew to 10, and I started sleeping in the office to make sure they stayed online, I knew it was time to look for a datacenter.
I did a lot of research over a three month period, looked at all the big datacenters, some of which are no longer around, and finally decided on Verio. Verio is more expensive and very stingy on hard drive space. But the support it top notch, their bandwidth reliable, and most important, in the past 12 years our sites have never been down for more than an hour in the worst cases. Usually if there is an outage the servers are back up before we even knew about the problem.
Obviously we don't require the resources that Twitter does. And there's a lot of technical discussions and general agreement that Ruby On Rails (RoR), on which Twitter is built, has a very difficult time scaling for applications the size of Twitter. I tend to agree and would love to see Twitter re-tooled on a more stable platform such as PHP. But application server preferences aside, the first thing any company should do is not skimp on their hosting provider. You definitely get what you pay for when it comes to hosting in my experience.
So, we wanted to take this opportunity to welcome Twitter to the Verio family. I'm still not convinced RoR is the platform on which to build a heavily trafficked service such as Twitter. But it is definitely going to help now that Twitter is housed in a world class data center such as Verio.
You can follow and connect with Roxanne on 
You can follow and connect with Shane on 
What Shane did not mention is that he was one of the early investors in TextDrive, which was purchased by Joyent to take them to that infamous "next level." The services got so bad that we chose not to host even little hobby sites there, even though Shane is entitled to free server space "for life" as part of the initial agreement.
On one hand, we understand intimately what a PITA the hosting business can be - so many creeps trying to break you constantly (ohh if you could only look at server logs!) not to mention all the various hardware and software elements. OTOH, best not to come out with your biggest bravado and rather let your customers do the pimping for you.
It's unquestionable that Joyent went through a very rough patch for awhile. I even moved my sites away from Joyent for a few months, but moved them back even before the OpenSolaris migrations started because stability had much improved.
But it's also unquestionable that the Joyent Accelerator product that Twitter was using has been incredibly stable and scales very well. The problem with Twitter appears to be the fault of Twitter, not the host. If they are switching hosts to save money or whatever, more power to them. If they think it will make Twitter more stable, they have another think coming.
@Fitzage - very good point and actually Shane and I discussed this possibility at dinner - before reading your comment. Without details, the peanut gallery is just out here guessing. The people with short fuses will go off and the loyalists will defend. Twitter is not very transparent about what all the down times are about and that appears to just piss people off more! The Twitter crowd I hang with has many willing to pay for an account if that would bring stability. So far, Twitter does not seem to want for money.
What then are the issues? It is hard to say.
Techcrunch has more info here stating that Twitter may have moved as part of a yet-to-be-announced investment by NTT, the company that purchased Verio many years ago. Sidenote: we were with Verio for several years before the NTT purchase.
So far it's all just rumor and speculation. And our industry does love its rumor and speculation. And I agree with Roxanne. For a company like Twitter that has quickly grown into one of the poster services for "Web 2.0" and community, they do an absolutely terrible job of communicating with their own community of loyal users.
In terms Joyent's Accelerators and their scalability and stability, I simply can't speak to that. It's interesting that just this morning I received my first ever Joyent email newsletter. The first sentence goes on about how Joyent powers 700m pages a month for Facebook apps. Perhaps their focus, and support, tends toward their large customers? I congratulate them if they have gotten the kinks worked out and their Accelerators are in fact now a stable platform.
I can only speak from experience when I say that we eventually had 5 hosting accounts at TextDrive/Joyent and the servers were down with unacceptable frequency, often for hours at a time. And it's just to expensive and time consuming to keep hoping back and forth between hosting providers.
What's up with using the gnome logo? http://www.gnome.org
What's up with Gnome using our Bare Feet Studios logo?
Seriously though. A couple of people have pointed this out since Gnome switched to this logo a couple years ago. We've been Bare Feet Studios since 2000. Roxanne actually developed this design a few years before Gnome came up with their current logo.
Don't know why they decided to use a footprint? Why not a pipe or a little gnome pointy hat? At least our logo has something to do with our name and the fact that we're based in Hawaii where shoes are optional.
you left joyent for verio ... are you kidding us? the verio web site looks like a used car lot. for shame.
@walter: No. We didn't "leave Joyent for Verio." We had been hosting at Verio for years before TextDrive or Joyent existed. We decided to put a few small websites at TextDrive when they first started and because we liked the brilliant people involved with TextDrive.
After a while, they just couldn't keep their servers running and we can't afford to have our client's sites, or our own, down for hours or days at a time.
In terms of what Verio's website looks like, I don't much care. All I know is that our Verio servers stay running. That's the most important thing for us.
Well, looks like the jury is in. Twitter's reliability is no better, and probably worse since the move to Verio.
I'm not saying it's Verio's fault, just that the infrastructure has nothing to do with Twitter's reliability issues.
@fitzage - it may be too early to tell with certainty, however I too noticed that Twitter has been performing badly earlier this week. The scaling needs of the database are mind-boggling, when you stop at look at the volume alone of DB queries as each new member joins.