Frequently Asked Questions
How do I open a Joyent Cloud Service Account?
Here’s a quick walk-through of how to open an account on Joyent:
- Create an account. Provide your name, company, email, and create a user name and password.
- Provide your phone number and then enter your confirmation code on your mobile phone to complete the phone verification security process.
- After this, you'll be asked to complete your billing information.
- Then you can either immediately add an SSH key for your account or skip until you want to provision. This is a very important step of our security policy.
SSH Guide: Windows | Mac OS X, Linux to immediately add your SSH key. - Once the SSH key is linked to your account, you'll be ready to provision a new instance.
How do I provision a new instance?
Sign in to the Joyent portal and click the 
in the upper right portion of the screen. Once you’re there, the tool will walk you through the choice of datacenters, images, and instance types and sizes. You’ll have a chance to review the hourly and monthly cost of the instance, and provide a memorable name for the instance. Once you’ve decided on the type of instance that fits your project, click the 
button and the system will ask to confirm your request. The provisioning will start immediately, but may take a few seconds to complete. Clicking on the new named instance will show its assigned public IP address when provisioning is complete. You may SSH into the instance with ssh -l root <ip address>.
How will I get billed for my instances?
Each month, Joyent will calculate the hourly usage of your instance and charge you based on the type and number of instances that you’ve provisioned. For customer paying via credit card, we’ll charge your credit card monthly. For customers paying via purchase orders, we’ll set up a recurring monthly billing plan for the service. All customers will receive a monthly statement summarizing their use of Joyent Cloud.
How do I stop, resize or reboot instances?
Shutting down, resizing or rebooting your instance can all be executed through the customer portal of Joyent. In addition, we’ve provided a script you can use to perform these steps within your instance. Hourly billing will stop once you destroy your instance.
How do I install software on my instance?
To install or update software on your instance, you’ll need to run commands as either the administrative or root user of your instance. For tips on how to run commands and installation processes, check out the pages on how to install software on your instance.
How do I secure my instance?
Joyent take cloud security very seriously and we have refined many processes to reduce risk and preserve the integrity of data managed in your instance. For a full list of security checks and processes, please visit the security center in our documentation.
How do you manage your instance resource usage?
One of strengths of Joyent is the ability to have full and detailed transparency of every aspect of your infrastructure and application. You can use Cloud Analytics to provide you real-time, diagnostic heatmaps of system behavior. In addition, using these tips here can provide you better control over optimizing the performance of your instance.
How do you manage a database on your instance?
Instances on Joyent can be pre-configured to run a wide range of databases and database services. Joyent supports: MySQL, Percona, Riak, MongoDB, as well as integration to database services from companies like, Cloudant or MongoLab. For big data projects, Joyent is an ideal platform for configuring and running a Hadoop cluster. Check out these guides on how to set up a database or configure your Hadoop cluster.
How do you analyze performance of my instances?
Joyent is the best cloud in the industry for monitoring the entire health of your stack. Using Cloud Analytics, you have the ability to examine, in real-time, the performance characteristics of every level of your application, and network. If you just want to perform server level monitoring, we’ve built integration with leading monitoring tools from New Relic and Nodefly as well.
Where are your data centers located?
- Class-1 DC Operators
- SSAE 16 Certified
- Multi-layered Physical Security
- Highly-Redundant Power
- Early Warning Fire Suppression
- All Tier-1 ISP Connectivity
- 10gb/40gb Fully-Meshed Network
- Full Peering, Fiber Connectivity
Where can I learn more?
Our documentation center and engineering blogs are terrific resources for you to learn more about Joyent and participate in the Joyent community. The Dev Center resources we’ve built for you will hopefully get you started on a path to success with Joyent. For additional help or training, please visit: