Ask HN: Where do you host your NodeJS applications? - tsenkov
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ratsbane
A second-hand IBM X3650 in my basement. 16GB RAM, dual quad-core 3Ghz Xeons,
dual power supplies, and hot-swap RAID 5 drives for less than $400 on eBay,
connected through the Comcast connection I already have. The Comcast
connection is the weak link. Google fiber would be _so_ nice.

~~~
WayneDB
I love those cheap refurbished IBM X servers. I use the tower models as
workstations.

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ddod
Since so many people here are saying Heroku, Linode, or AWS, I'm wondering if
someone could explain the value proposition of these over a cheap VPS for most
small to medium deployments.

I can get a 4GB ram VPS for $10/m, which seems orders of magnitude cheaper
than the popular options. What am I missing out on?

~~~
abrown28
where?

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ddod
I personally use UGVPS and ChicagoVPS. You can find a bunch of offers on
lowendbox and webhostingtalk

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electrichead
Heroku at the moment. It has a good selection of add-ons (neo4j hosted for
free) and I've found it "good enough". I have used nodejitsu before but when
they bumped up all their prices for seemingly no reason, I left. Nodejitsu
supports websockets whereas heroku only supports polling. Deploying to
nodejitsu was a tonne faster than heroku.

~~~
mark_l_watson
I haven't tried Nodejitsu yet, but their pricing looks really good because
they have a $9/month plan for low volume web apps. My gripe about Heroku
(which I have used on customer and my own projects) is that the minimum
monthly price to get always-on service is $35/month. (The free tier unloads
your app if it has no traffic for a while so the next user waits for a loading
request). I have several personal projects that I want always-on, but they are
low traffic apps.

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weavie
It is very easy to set up a service to ping your app once an hour to
circumvent this.

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dbond
Have used Heroku, Dotcloud and AWS Elastic Beanstalk, all with good results.

Also hosting a few private apps on a digital ocean vps using dokku[1] which is
working pretty well so far.

1\. [https://github.com/progrium/dokku](https://github.com/progrium/dokku)

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plasma
Azure offers a free tier and hosts nodejs native:
[http://www.windowsazure.com/en-
us/develop/nodejs/](http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/nodejs/)

(Disclaimer: Only used it for a simple app)

~~~
davidbanham
Their node stuff is hosted on Windows, so some compiled modules will fail.
Also, have had the deployment status lie to me a _lot_. Big green ticks when
my app failed to deploy. Telling me the app has been updated to a new commit
while still blithely serving the old version for _three days_.

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vjk2005
So far I've been using Heroku, but lately as the apps I've been trying to put
together have begun to have more interconnected pieces, their service has
started to become stifling. For example, getting nginx to proxy to Node
requires convoluted setups like "buildpacks" and other Heroku-specific custom
configs all of which can be alleviated by switching to a VPS, which is what
I'm planning to do in the coming months.

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cdl
[https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Node-
Hosting](https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Node-Hosting)

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deoxxa
EC2 for some things, dedicated hardware for some others.

Where it sits, however, is only part of the problem!

I use plz[1] and instagit[2] in tandem via post-receive hooks to do the
"deployment" bit, along with a service registry (closed-source, written on
work time, boo!) like seaport[3] and a proxy based on httppp[4] to route
requests to the right application.

\---

1\. [https://github.com/deoxxa/plz](https://github.com/deoxxa/plz)

2\. [https://github.com/deoxxa/instagit](https://github.com/deoxxa/instagit)

3\. [https://github.com/substack/seaport](https://github.com/substack/seaport)

4\. [https://github.com/deoxxa/httppp](https://github.com/deoxxa/httppp)

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philbo
I'm going to try modulus.io later on today.

Obviously I don't have an opinion yet but my reason for giving it a try is
that I've been told you get a free database instance in the same data center
as your node instance, which is obviously good from a latency point of view.

~~~
idointernet
I'm very curious modulus. Anyone else have any experience using them?

~~~
jonahss
I just used them for a small project and was really happy with it. They
provide just a couple environment vars attached to the process object and
you're good to go.

I was talking to some of their employees at nodeconf this year and they
explained that since Heroku only routes one request to an instance at a time,
it essentially blocks on each request and you never get to actually leverage
the concurrency of node.

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zkirill
I'm hosting on a Joyent SmartOS instance where the Node.js application is kept
alive using the Service Management Facility (SMF).

I recently tried Heroku and Nodejitsu (business account) and ended up going
back to Joyent.

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tsenkov
Just to list some of the most popular choices:

    
    
      Heroku
      Nodejitsu
      VPS
      Linode
      Digital Ocean
      Amazon AWS
      dotCloud
      OpenShift
      CleverCloud
      NodeJS Cloud (by CleverCloud)

~~~
ruberino
I'll say check out Modulus ([http://modulus.io](http://modulus.io)) we're new
but things are very well.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders.

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wolfeidau
I currently use a couple of things:

* Heroku

* ec2 using awsbox for dev with push deploys [https://github.com/mozilla/awsbox](https://github.com/mozilla/awsbox)

If you want SSL support and have a few apps then heroku can be a bit
expensive, also monitoring is a paid addon.

Lots of choices at the moment which is awesome.

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richards
I just wrote up an eval of 11 popular node providers
[https://seroter.wordpress.com/2013/07/29/where-the-heck-
do-i...](https://seroter.wordpress.com/2013/07/29/where-the-heck-do-i-host-my-
node-js-app/)

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flowerpot
If you are looking for a self hosted solution I would recommend taking a look
at Dokku. Its like a self hosted mini version of Heruko.

[https://github.com/progrium/dokku](https://github.com/progrium/dokku)

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munimkazia
In my organization, we have a data center. For my own side projects, I have
used linode, but I am considering looking at PAAS solutions if they aren't too
expensive.

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wesleystrikes
NodeCloud is great for scalable and custom tailored Nodejs infrastructure -
[http://nodecloud.io/](http://nodecloud.io/)

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jaxbot
Linode. It's cheap and gives me full control, though I would be curious to see
how its cost to scale is vs. other "cloud" platforms.

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ewolfe
AWS Elastic Beanstalk. I was going with the heroku route at first, until they
wanted to charge me $20 a month to enable SSL support for my app!

~~~
chuckd1356
I'm going through the exact same transition right now. $20/month is more than
the cert itself.

~~~
jordanthoms
IIRC it's because they can't just attach an extra IP to their load balancers
for each SSL site, since Amazon doesn't allow you to attach multiple elastic
ips to one instance. So, they need to use an elastic load balancer for each
site, which costs $18 per month + bandwidth. So they are probably actually
just breaking even or losing money on that $20/month fee.

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dpweb
6 different apps, one of which hosts 12 blogs, all on a $1/mo. 128MB RAM
Hosted w/SSD. Node, good stuff..

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waxzce
there is [http://www.clever-cloud.com/](http://www.clever-cloud.com/) and the
[http://nodejs-cloud.com/](http://nodejs-cloud.com/) services :-) no PRISM
issue on it & auto scaling

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andypants
Could this post be made into a poll?

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nailer
EC2, for no other reason that's where my company hosts all its apps.

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filearts
Also nodejitsu for Plunker.

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rfolstad
VPS (debian) needed websockets and SSL

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prodev42
the most popular ones I hear from hackernews and reddit prog seems to be

microsoft azure

heroku

digital ocean

linode

amazon aws

dotcloud

openshift

openstack

google appengine

can anyone tell me the pros and cons of each?I doubt there will be one who who
tried them all though...

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hungsbellabell
Digital Ocean

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timmillwood
Heroku

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mmmmm
Heroku

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pbobak
VPS or Heroku

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umren
digitalocean

~~~
regecks
Me too. I'd love to use Heroku/AppFog/whatever but there always seems to be a
snag (no websockets, no UDP traffic, bleh).

Might have to try Nodejitsu one of these days but the pricing kind of pains me
when I think about how many low-traffic node apps I can host on a $5 DO.

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MattiasE
Linode

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jeanbebe
EC2

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mambodog
Linode

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elisee
VPS

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girvo
VPS

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daleharvey
Linode

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giulivo
OpenShift

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oron
reliablesite.net

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joshka
heroku

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yoshuawuyts
nodejitsu

