You say you are in the dark – did you not see http://www.joyeur.com/2008/01/22/bingodisk-and-strongspace-what-happened?
It laid out what happened and is happening pretty clearly.

It was posted on the Current Issues page AND in the forums beforehand. It was also mentioned in one of the emails sent out earlier this week.

http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?id=21137

https://help.joyent.com/index.php?pg=forums.posts&id=709

It seems we are in a no win situation with you here.

My business once again halted by technical incompetence.

Oh.. the frustration.

The thing is, email is not the answer. A status page is not the answer. Each method of communication needs to be equally timely and informative as a person might have time to only see one notice. A post saying that a service is down without any indication of what is wrong and what to expect is not acceptable. The post can even be wrong initially; we’d understand that. We just want to see and understand that the problem with transparency. It happens constantly here. There are 5 notices on the status page right now saying a service is down, and then it’s back up without any real indication of why. We might get that Apache crashed, or MySQL maintenance is being done. We don’t get why, or what is being done to prevent it in the future.

These uninformative (and often untimely) updates only lead to more anxiety for us, the customer, because we either have to believe that Joyent is doing their best blindly, or see a pattern of downtime which leads us to believe that they are not.

Seeing that both Bingodisk and Strongspace are not accepting new customers is another such issue. Rather than take care of their customers first, Joyent posts some odd EOL-looking notices. I understand if they don’t want new customers right now given recent issues, but, if that is the case, they should have continued to prevent signups since the Bingodisk and SS outage was fixed. Once again, we’re in the dark.

As far as I know, there is no “backup”. Strongspace is (supposed to be) a service with built in redundancy provided by ZFS and RAID. What customers are asking for Joyent to remove the single point of failure that comes from running all of Strongspace from a single server / data center / RAID array, etc.

E.g. run two systems in parallel in different data centers. When one goes down for an upgrade, the other takes over. When the first comes back online, data is re-synced. That doesn’t mean 20 GB is re-synced, only new data.

Without this, Strongspace is still susceptible to the catastrophic failure and data loss that can occur with all your eggs in one basket. There are no guarantees that a particular system or RAID array will not be physically damaged beyond repair at a single site.

Even without those dangers, simply upgrading the operating system seems fraught with peril which causes the entire system to come down with no recourse when bringing the new / updated systems back online without knowing the consequences of those updates on production data – e.g. what we’re seeing here right now.

Throughout the whole ordeal, I had to deal with MediaTemple. Let me tell you, they are far, far worse than Joyent. Actually, I’ve dealt with several companies who I think have a much worse track record. But MediaTemple, and many other companies like them, have pretty much NO means of keeping you in the loop on system status. Particularly when things go awry.

All things considered, I won’t be taking my business elsewhere. Note that I don’t take all my business to Joyent, by any means. But I’m not giving up recommending Bingo Disk or StrongSpace, believe it or not. Nor am I going to stop recommending them for hosting, where appropriate.

No-one handles these kinds of events to everyone’s satisfaction. And while most of the commenters on here are pissed (understandably), Joyent has done a decent job, in my opinion. I have received several emails, and RSS as well, and knew they were down almost as soon as it happened (from Joyent, not from my customers complaints!)…

I guess I’m saying that some of you might go a little easier on these fellas. I can say from personal experience that when I have smaller issues, such as a Rails problem I can’t figure out, I’m guilty of being so frustrated that I submit a ticket, even though I realize it’s probably not Joyent’s fault.

You know what? It almost never is. But almost every time, they have actually fixed it for me. It’s unbelievable. I once complained on my company blog about an issue with a Rails application running on Joyent, and David personally wrote to offer help on the issue. And they fixed it – an issue that was not their fault at all, but turned out to be in my code. I’ve never known another company like Joyent, when it comes to this kind of genuine concern for a customer. A customer, mind you, who paid a one-time fee! That is, they’ve already got my money! I’m not paying next month! And David still offers to help out.

Maybe my experiences have been different from yours, sure. But I’ve been using these services since they each launched, and have been a customer for a good three years. And nearly all of my experiences have been quite pleasant.

That’s all. Just wanted to add my two cents. Carry on!

It’s great that Joyent has all these channels for distributing information. But if you’re only sending out some of the information over some of the channels, you’ve got to tell the recipients a) that they’re not getting a complete set of information, and b) where to go to find a complete set of information.

In this case some of Joyent’s customers are clearly having a hard time finding the Current Issues page. Maybe that’s because they’ve forgotten or don’t know where to look or didn’t read or whatever. Whatever the case, it doesn’t matter – Joyent needs to help its customers find this information; even if seems blindingly obvious to you where it is.

I apologize if I’m coming off like a jerk here, but my intent is to be helpful. I have decades of experience working with large organizations that have trouble properly distributing information, leaving customers confused and irritated, and I’d very much like to see Joyent avoid these problems because I like it here and want the company to succeed.