There are some notable names running on Joyent's infrastructure. They could have used AWS instead, but they didn't. I don't know if that means anything though, since there are odd ducks in every crowd.
One thing I like about Joyent is they're not trying to solve hard-to-impossible problems like Amazon (e.g. EBS), but rather realistic and immediate problems (e.g. guaranteed disk latency). For all EBS's promises, the latter is vastly more important to me; I've had few problems EBS would solve, and a truckload that higher-quality I/O would.
Also, those analytics are nothing to sneeze at. That's worth almost as much as the IO.
If you really care about low latency, get a dedicated server. You will even get better specs if you spend the same money. There are amazing deals out there, like this one:
One thing I like about Joyent is they're not trying to solve hard-to-impossible problems like Amazon (e.g. EBS), but rather realistic and immediate problems (e.g. guaranteed disk latency). For all EBS's promises, the latter is vastly more important to me; I've had few problems EBS would solve, and a truckload that higher-quality I/O would.
Also, those analytics are nothing to sneeze at. That's worth almost as much as the IO.