Facebook, Joyent and Sun have partnered to provide free scalable, on-demand infrastructure from Joyent to Facebook developers. Joyent’s Accelerator on-demand infrastructure provides the very best load balancers, routing and switching fabric, x86 servers and storage from Sun. 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). The Accelerator will be yours to use free 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 reclaimed.
Just fill out the form on this page (including your Facebook developer key), and your account details will be sent within minutes (if you do not receive an email from us, it generally indicates that you’ve been placed on the waitlist; you won’t receive an email from us until your account is set up). The service is completely free, unless you get really popular and need to upgrade to a larger Accelerator. 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 this free service. Please note that these free Accelerators are intended to serve as a development environment. Our goal is to help you get off the ground. After your app goes live on facebook, you will likely soon need to upgrade to a larger Accelerator on one of our monthly or yearly plans.
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. Cancel at any time. No contracts. The full price list is for our monthly and yearly plans is here.
Free Accelerators™ for Facebook developers feature:
| Hardware | Guaranteed % of CPU | Bandwidth | RAM | Storage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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
Joyent provides no support for this free service. Knowledgebase is here. We also have a very helpful and knowledgeable user community on our forum, where you can ask questions, pitch ideas and get to know other facebook developers.
Fine Print
Sun and the Sun Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.