Facebook Developers Get Free Hosting From JoyentFacebook Developers Get Free Hosting From Joyent

Opening the gates to the social-networking paradise even wider, "virtual hosting" company Joyent this week is expected to begin offering free hosting to developers of Facebook applications.

Joyent CEO David Young will announce the new offer at the Facebook Developers Garage event in Dallas on Tuesday.

"There are tens of millions of users sloshing around on this single Facebook platform," said Young as he boarded a flight to Dallas for the Developers Garage. "These apps can go viral very quickly, so you need to have the infrastructure that allows you to scale up very quickly."

Joyent is offering the "Accelerator," as the company's on-demand infrastructure subscription service is known, for Facebook developers in conjunction with Dell, which is supplying the server infrastructure for the program. The Dell servers run Open Solaris.

There are thought to be more than 100,000 Facebook developers today, with around 6000 available applications. According to Nick O'Neill of AllFacebook.com, four of those applications have more than 1 million daily users and 91 have generated 1 million-plus total installs. Around 15% of all Facebook applications have at least 10,000 installs, meaning that the vast majority have a few thousand users or less.

Facebook originally opened its application programming interface (API) to third-party developers in August 2006, expanding that earlier this year to include greater access to Facebook's user networks and better tools to make money from the Facebook audience.

Last month, Google introduced a set of APIs, known as OpenSocial, for building applications that will work across various social networking sites.

Joyent's developer program will provide one free Joyent Accelerator to the first 3500 Facebook developers that sign up. The hosting service will be free for one year. (Joyent's basic hosting service normally costs around $45 per month.)

In addition, Joyent's data center in Emeryville, Calif. will have a direct peering relationship with the Facebook data center in San Francisco -- meaning that any latency in loading applications within Facebook will be eliminated. Young said that Accelerator revenues are increasing at 500% yearly.

Noting that one developer, Kinzin.com, a social network for families and photo-sharing, went from a handful of users to more than half-a-million in the month after launching its application on Facebook, Young said he's unsure how rapid the uptake of the Accelerator offer will be.

"It's hard to know what's going to happen," he said. "I'm expecting to be surprised."