Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

Joyent has changed for the better, VP says

analysis
May 7, 20082 mins

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

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

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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