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.
What’s Included?
A Joyent Facebook Developer Accelerator includes everything you need to develop and deploy your Facebook application. You get root access to a virtualized machine that includes all the tools for developing Facebook applications in PHP, Rails, and Python.
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). There’s nothing to pay for a year. All that we ask is that your Facebook application be ‘active and in use’. Any Facebook application sitting on a Joyent Accelerator that is dormant for more than 30 days will be re-claimed.
All we need is some simple information, your Facebook developer key, and your account details will be sent within minutes (if we have open accounts…sometimes you have to wait a few days). The service is completely free, unless you get really popular and need more Accelerators. You have root access. Within your Joyent Accelerator you’ll find all the libraries you need to develop great Facebook applications in PHP, Rails, and Python. However, if we’ve missed something, no worries. You are root. You can add whatever additional tools you need.
You’re going to love your Facebook Accelerator. We’ve seen developers like you do amazing things with their free service. And you?
Some additional terms: Due to the limited resources available, and the overwhelming positive response from Facebook developers, we’ve modified the terms for the free Joyent Facebook 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 Facebook Accelerator as the resource quotas allow (512 MB RAM and 10GiB Storage). You may also build applications on non-Facebook platforms, however, your Facebook application must remain active and in use in order to remain qualified for this program. An active Facebook application is defined as application that has more than 50 total users. The number of users is obtained from this URL: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=<Your.app.id>. Within that page, the total number of users is calculated as being equal to daily active users divided by percentage of total users. One Accelerator per person.
Price
Free for a year. One Accelerator account per person. It’s free. Prices start at $45/month for those that don’t want the hassle. Cancel at any time. No contracts. The full price list is here.
Free Accelerators™ for Facebook developers feature:
| Hardware | Guaranteed % of CPU | Bandwidth | RAM | Storage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Dell, PowerEdge 2950 2 Quad-Core Intel© Xeon© processors |
1/32 Burstable up to 95% |
not metered* | 512 MiB | 10 GiB |
Special Notes: The Free Joyent Accelerator™ cannot be used with BIG-IP load-balancing. Mail pre-configured for outbound SMTP only, limited to 500 recipients per hour. There are no limits on the number of OpenSocial users your application may host. * We reserve the right to deal with abuse.
Support
We have an amazing community surrounding Joyent, and have set up a forum where you can ask questions, pitch ideas and get to know other developers doing cool things. Joyent provides no support for this free service.
Fine Print
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