we use joyent.com - at least we try to... The portfolio is impressive, and we mainly chose them because they offer horizontally scalable rails solutions, something that many providers are still missing.
We requested the new server 2 weeks before. Still no server...
Do you know of alternatives we might be looking for?
If there are many crappy things out there and some rare jewels stick out, I think it's justified to say there is an overall lack of imagination.
It's that what many people notice when they visit Second Life the first time. Large abandoned places. Nothing of real interest.
Second Life is missing Google. There is nothing that really helps people to find the good things in Second Life.
I'm sure it was a kind of "google effect" in the old days that showed people what sites on the internet were good and widely accepted, and by that they started to improve their own sites. Maybe if something like that is built, true innovation and improvement will be noticed and more easily adopted by the citizens...
we didn't make it. Maybe it was because we didn't get that prototype online.
I seriously might go over to JoyEnt and kill all those lousy bastards ;-) We were promised our new server repeatedly the next day for two weeks now, believed in it and didn't just put that damn thing online on an improvised dyndns box. Big fault, I suppose... :(
Question is: Do you really need something like gut instinct?
I think there's one thing that it is appropriate for: Quickly needed decisions with a "social background", if you are experienced at judging human behavior (I don't know the exact English word for "Menschenkenntnis").
Else: Don't do it. Do not decide based on pure gut instinct. Try to get something more dependable: Ask friends, ask experts, talk to people who know more than you or provide a different point of view and then judge their comments against each other. There's almost always a way to get the information you need if you have the time, and it's very seldom you don't have time.
Then it brakes down to experience and self-confidence, I guess. Luckily, my gut instinct is right, usually :-)
Ruby (on Rails) for the web interface, I love it! :-)
Java for data mining, image manipulation and data shoveling, like in xml transformation. You can't really use Ruby for this... We also chose a servlet for one of our web services for performance reasons.