Hosting Designed For Facebook Applications

Joyent has announced a new hosting service specifically targeting Facebook applications. Facebook doesn't host third party applications, that's up to the responsibility of the application developer. If an application becomes popular that can really put a strain on the applications server and the developers pocket book. Joyent, a start up web hosting and on demand computing services provider based in California, will be offering developers a place to host their Facebook applications for free. Yes, you read that right, free. Read the whole article on GigaOM here.

On the surface it appears to be a boon for developers, a fiber connection between the Joyent and Facebook data centers should improve the speed which applications load. According to statistics in the GigaOM post, most Facebook applications have less than 10,000 users. While that sounds like a significant amount that shouldn't put too heavy a load on most web servers. Once you get above that, traditional web hosting services just can't handle the amount of traffic and the applications starts timing out.

A couple of things developers will still need to do. 1) write tighter applications, because no matter how fast the backbone, poorly written code will timeout. 2) You may need to upgrade to Joyent's higher tier services, which is what they are betting on and the reason they justify providing a free service.

Amazon EC2 and S3 is an alternative to look at if your Facebook application is already beating up your current web server. The price is very reasonable and the service is very reliable.

The Joyent service hasn't officially been announced, supposedly that happens tomorrow. I would hope that's when we get to see what the limitations of the free service are. Tune in tomorrow for more information.