Joyent started out as Text Drive, originally developed in 2004 as a managed hosting service for users of founder Dean Allen’s TextPattern CMS. In

a bid to raise capital, Allen offered lifetime hosting to the first two hundred customers at a fixed price – a move that secured TextDrive a successful start.

In 2005 Text Drive was bought by Joyent, developers of web-based collaboration software.

Company and Services
Joyent (the new name for Text Drive) is privately owned and is headquartered in Marin County (just north of San Francisco), California. It has a global customer-base of around 10,000 and serves five billion web pages each month. Joyent provides the infrastructure for around a quarter of the third-party applications running on Facebook. Joyent is currently in the process of re-branding TextDrive (and all its hosting brands) under the Joyent/Accelerators™ brand.

The essence of Joyent's hosting is its scalable approach to computing infrastructure and services. Joyent hosting doesn’t entail just renting a given amount of space and bandwidth each month on a shared or dedicated server - instead customers get access to the “Joyent Cloud Computing” with the Joyent Accelerators™ acting as the building blocks for the whole infrastructure.

Joyent's Accelerators™ are virtualized servers which are linked via an advanced network and routing system with load balancing to provide constant and fast storage. The end result, the company claims, is a highly scalable on-demand infrastructure for running websites and rich web applications written in languages such as Ruby on the Rails, PHP, Java and Python.

Other products offered by Joyent are Connector (a collection of easy to use web applications) and BingoDisk (online disk storage). Support is offered through email ticketing during normal office hours (Pacific Standard Time).

TextDrive/Joyent is well known for its commitment to open source software and regularly donates some of its profits to open source projects of its customers' choice. Well known clients include Twitter.com, The Los Angeles Times, ABC/Disney and Major League Baseball.

Server Location
Joyent has its Accelerator data centres are across the San Francisco Bay in Emeryville and in San Diego California, as well as in Andover Massachusetts.

Related Links
Blog: http://www.joyeur.com/ (click on weblog)
Old TextDrive Blog: http://weblog.textdrive.com/
Forum - http://discuss.joyent.com/