Joyent's Free Facebook Hosting Offer: No vacancy

I recently signed up for Joyent's Free Facebook Hosting offer so I could use it for hosting a nonprofit's Facebook application using the open source framework I released last week. I was a bit surprised when Joyent responded to my query regarding my account request with this:

"Thanks for having signed up. Due to the demand and the limited spaces available, you have been placed on a waiting list for one of the free Facebook Accelerators. As we reclaim unused accounts, those spaces will open up. While it's not possible to provide an ETA, it's unlikely the setup will occur today. If you need hosting sooner, you may want to take a look at one of our monthly or yearly Accelerator plans that can be found at http://www.joyent.com/accelerator/pricing/."

A week later, I'm still waiting. This reminded me of Bait and Switch:

"In retail sales, a bait and switch is a form of fraud in which the party putting forth the fraud lures in customers by advertising a product or service at an unprofitably low price, then reveals to potential customers that the advertised good is not available but that a substitute is. The goal of the bait-and-switch is to convince some buyers to purchase the substitute good as a means of avoiding disappointment over not getting the bait, or as a way to recover sunk costs expended to try to obtain the bait."

Facebook announced the partnership with Joyent in November. Joyent's sign up page still prominently reads:

Facebook, Joyent and Dell have partnered to provide free scalable, on-demand infrastructure from Joyent to Facebook developers. Joyent’s Accelerator on-demand infrastructure (peered with Facebook’s datacenter!) provides the very best load balancers, routing and switching fabric, x86 servers and storage from Dell. Facebook developers can take advantage of Joyent Accelerators to quickly launch Facebook applications capable of scaling to millions of users. All for free. ... There's nothing to pay for a year.

Of course, this is no longer true. Perhaps something like this might now be in order:

While Joyent's offer may not technically be bait and switch because it's original press release does clearly state: "The company’s dedicated developer program will provide one free Joyent Accelerator to the first 3,500 Facebook developers that enter the program." The limitation is not mentioned anywhere on the free hosting landing/promotion/sign up page (not even in the fine print or additional terms ... click to enlarge):

 

Nor was it mentioned in Facebook's original announcement or a variety of good faith blogosphere coverage (GigaOm, AllFacebook, Marketing.fm)  [note: some sites did report the capacity limitation e.g. Infoweek, ReadWriteWeb].

But anyway, at this point, Facebook and Joyent should definitely clarify the landing page more clearly. I would think someone at Dell might be concerned about being linked to this as well.

Comments

[Rod Boothby]

Hi Jeff,

I am the VP of Platform Evangelism at Joyent. I am sorry that you have been caught in the queue. We originally created 3,500 free slots for Facebook developers.

The demand has been incredible, and there is now a queue for those slots.

We are doing out best to churn through the existing users, and there has been turn-over.

Turn over happens when developers fail to make use of the free resources to actually develop Facebook applications.

So far, we have removed over 700 accounts because the developers were not using them. We then recycled those slots.

We are planning another review in the next few days, and will also be adding 500 new slots in the near future.

- Rod

[LexP]

Then take it off your landing page. It's viewed by users as a scam otherwise.

[Cheater]

They are cheating...

[S Walker]

Why dont they even tell you how long the wait is going to be? I have been waiting ages now, and still not heard anything! They should at least tell you how long the que is!

[jpf]

Of course, they were happy to collect your e-mail address before telling you they were full.