Do they do load balancing and stuff between locations and route around anywhere with issues? That would be amazing.
Balancing between multiple companies I think would still be better just because of different middlewares and the cascading nature of problems at high scale though.
Unfortunately not, they currently just let you pick which location (AWS US East, Ireland, Rackspace are the main options I think?) you deploy your app to. You could deploy the same codebase to 2 locations and use DNS to load balance / failover between them, but that's not great.
I just saw this e-mail. Oh, days of free hosting, I knew you were numbered! ;) These guys are super cool, and I'm not just saying that because they currently host my side project (http://muxamp.com/). Nodester's software is super easy to use, works great, and makes nice use of Git. Chris Matthieu and co. deserve recognition for their work.
Thanks for letting me know! I got the impression hosting would become a paid service from this paragraph in the announcement email:
"As part of the AppFog family, Nodester users will now be able to use the same PaaS for their Ruby and Java apps that they use for their Node apps. It brings the serious support and operational excellence of AppFog to our users, enabling them to run production and enterprise workloads on their developer PaaS. Perhaps most significant of all - it allows Nodester users to deploy apps to a wide range of different IaaS providers - at a highly competitive price" (emphasis is mine).
Exactly and that's plenty of sandbox to play around in. I have a few apps set up with them right now, nowhere near my limit.
AppFog has a ton of options, and their setup is super easy. Deploying apps is as simple as doing a git push and the service is super fast. I am a total fanboy.
Kind of like a multi-PAAS HireFireApp that also handles deployment.