Bebo, Joyent and Sun have partnered to provide free scalable, on-demand infrastructure from Joyent to Bebo developers. Joyent’s Accelerator on-demand infrastructure provides the very best load balancers, routing and switching fabric, x86 servers and storage from Sun. Bebo developers can take advantage of Joyent-Bebo Shared Accelerators to quickly launch Bebo applications. If and when your app outgrows the free account, you can then migrate over to one of our dedicated Joyent Accelerator plans, capable of scaling to millions of users.
What’s Included?
A Joyent-Bebo Shared Accelerator includes everything you need to develop and deploy your Bebo application. You get a shared hosting account on Joyent’s Accelerator-based Cloud Computing infrastructure. Your account includes all the tools needed for developing Bebo applications in PHP, Rails, and Python.
Each account provides resources equal to the Plus plan on our Joyent Connector Shared Accelerator platform.
Our hosting is based on OpenSolaris because it is super-stable, reboots fast, and is designed for scaling. Also, running on Solaris allows us to use Dtrace in any scaling consulting you have us do for you. It provides unparalleled views into your app to help optimize it. This is not available for Linux.
Most of our Accelerator users did not use Solaris prior to coming to us, and they’ve made the shift without much adjustment. Accelerators have a Solaris kernel but we’ve put a BSD userland on top of it, so the directory structure is familar. We’ve also provided a set of user-friendly Solaris help resources.
Note: We do not currently support Windows, and do not plan to do so in the foreseeable future.
How it works
Sign up (see the orange arrow on the right). The Accelerator will be yours to use free for six month. All that we ask is that your Bebo application be ‘active and in use’. Any Bebo application sitting on a Joyent Accelerator that is dormant for more than 30 days will be reclaimed.
Just fill out the form on this page (including your Bebo developer key), and a confirmation email will be sent within minutes. These accounts require some manual setup, so you’ll receive a welcome email once the account is actually created and ready for you, generally within 24 hours of signup.
Price
Free for six months. Cancel at any time. No contracts.
Upgrades
You can upgrade to a paid Joyent plan when your free plan expires. You may choose to stick with shared hosting, and sign up for a Connector Shared Accelerator hosting account. But if your app takes off and you outgrow the free account at any point, you’ll want to migrate over to a dedicated Joyent Accelerator.
Support
Joyent provides no support for this free service. But we do provide a very useful and comprehensive set of resources for guidance and troubleshooting.
Some additional terms: Due to the limited resources available, and the overwhelming positive response from Bebo developers, we’ve modified the terms for the free Joyent Bebo Accelerators. You must use your free account within 30 days after receiving log-in credentials from Joyent. You must also log into your account once every sixty days via ssh or webmin. You can have as many applications on the Bebo Accelerator as the resource quotas allow. You may also build applications on non-Bebo platforms, however, your Bebo application must remain active and in use in order to remain qualified for this program. An active Bebo application is defined as application that has more than 50 total users. One Accelerator per person.
Fine Print
Sun and the Sun Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.