Ask HN: Does anybody know of a node.js hosting provider?

[megamark16]

I've been reading up a little on Node.js and I was just wondering if there are any hosts out there that provide preconfigured Node.js hosting options that I could just start dropping code into and playing with and load testing without messing with too much configuration.

My other question is, if the options for this type of hosting are few to none, do you think there is or will be a market for this type of hosting?

[Klonoar]

I've been running my Node.js instances on a shared hosting account at Webfaction. Extremely stable, very easy to set up, very cheap to maintain.

It's where I test my builds of Luno, actually. (http://github.com/ryanmcgrath/luno)

[ichverstehe]

There won't be a market. Yet. It will take a lot more momentum before it happens. Ruby has Heroku and Engine Yard. But the Ruby ecosystem is much larger.

[megamark16 → ichverstehe]

Yeah, after posting this I jumped on the #node.js irc and got the same response. It's too new, a lot of people are goofing off with it, checking it out and trying out different implementations and such.

I wonder if there are any production websites running on node.js.

[davidw]

Why not just use a cheap Linode (or slightly less cheap Slicehost if that's your thing)?

[megamark16 → davidw]

Well, I could do that pretty easily and start toying around, but I'm thinking more along the lines of setting up a hosting provider using one of the existing web frameworks for node.js (like Express, Coltrane, etc), a templating engine, and database interface. What if there were a straight forward way to say "drop your templates here, put your models here, and your javascript to interact with them here"? I'd like to get a simple blog or super light weight CRM up and running on a host somewhere and start load testing it :-p.

[bengl]

I was thinking along these lines as well. I was keen on Appjet and I think it would be great if that void were filled with something node.js-based. (Or maybe narwhal? Or both?)