Joyent is fantastic. SmartOS has every feature a Linux user wants in (and usually ends up hacking onto) a cloud server but it's built that way from the ground up.
Their support and engineering staff are friendly and responsive by email and IRC.
The instances have great performance and uptime.
I suppose globally they could use more data centers but Samsung's acquisition should help with that.
I've built multiple companies in Joyent and can't imagine going back to other clouds with less features.
I was also a "lifetime" customer and my memories of the terrible treatment, including one of the founders flaming people on the forums for making reasonable requests, mean I will never do business with Joyent again.
We (Erigones, https://www.erigones.com/en/) are making our own virtualization, orchestration and cloud suite, available for public use, based on SmartOS.
So far for commercial customers only (demo available) but we will release opensource community edition soon on Github.
Their support and engineering staff are friendly and responsive by email and IRC.
The instances have great performance and uptime.
I suppose globally they could use more data centers but Samsung's acquisition should help with that.
I've built multiple companies in Joyent and can't imagine going back to other clouds with less features.