Hey Reddit, Joyent wants to steal you away from AWS

If you were looking to waste time on the Internet yesterday, you might’ve been out of luck.

Pinterest, Flipboard, Foursquare and Netflix were among the many sites impacted by the latest Amazon Web Services outage, but none inspired more hand-wringing than Reddit, the increasingly infamous community that some have called the “secret backbone of the Internet” (it’s often the starting point for viral content).

Where some saw nothing but bad news, the marketing team at Joyent, a competing cloud provider, recognized an opportunity. In a post on the company blog, Joyent made its pitch to Reddit, promising 99.999% uptime and a storage block that doesn’t depend on network connections to work — all of which would translate to better availability of rage comics, AMAs and Ryan Gosling memes.

The post demonstrated that Joyent knows its way around the Reddit community, but how did the notoriously skeptical Redditors respond? With a mixture of follow-up jokes, insults and, well, some serious questions about Joyent’s claims. “Nobody can guarantee they won’t let you down at some point,” said user calzoneman. Others pointed to Joyent’s much-publicized issues with honoring lifetime accounts.

And then there’s platinumbinder, whose comment may sum up the sentiment of productivity-seeking managers everywhere: “I have a feeling that reddit downtime is actually beneficial for the world, so hosting on servers that have reasonable amounts of downtime is actually a positive thing.”

It’s doubtful that Reddit will actually make any kind of switch, but you have to give points to Joyent for creativity. Right? Ok, go back to wasting time now.