What are your experiences with Joyent?

Joyent is still a good option, although a lot of other vendors have caught up to and surpassed what used to be one of the clear market leaders. As a result, Joyent is not highly differentiated from other cloud providers. Joyent's strengths include:

1. The company has a lot of large customers so if you are looking for a safe bet that you can defend in front of a CIO, CEO, or Board of Directors, Joyent is a good bet.

2. Their cloud API is a fairly rich, well used, and well documented.

3. Joyent, along with Amazon, has the longest history of providing scalable computing resources across a number of different areas like SAN.

4. They have historically provdied really fast disk access so it's well suited for highend database stuff.

Joyent's weaknesses include:

1. Cloud computing, at least at the infrastructure level, is quickly becoming a commodity. Rackspace and Amazon caught Joyent a while ago and are applying enormous resources to their services.

2. Those same competitors, because of the economies of scale they yield, can offer better pricing.

3. Joyent customer service sometimes receives poor marks although the hosting, cloud space is not an area where many providers receive good reviews (Rackspace is a marketing genius because of this).

This market is already about pricing and service. Joyent will win or lose based on those two things so your due diligence should cover product capabilities, but pay closest attention to economics and support.