One question - does it support TCP sockets? I've evaluated a dozen or so Node.js hosting solutions and none (0, null, nil) supported TCP sockets. HTTP/S and WebSockets only. It's ridiculous - a TCP server is a major use case for Node.js and yet if you want to host it, you must configure and administrate your own server (on EC2 or whatever).
I wonder how pricing is determined for these offerings? Ie whats the driver for profitability?<p>My thinking is as follows: if I use a popular IAAS for servers to host customers node.js apps, and if I have instances with 15GB of ram, if I offer application instances that are allocated at most 256MB, then I can fit about 58 application instances on a server (allowing 500MB for the OS). At 6€ an instance (for the intro tier) that's 348€ a month<p>An EC2 M3.xlarge costs about $81 a month (3 year heavy reserved, amortizing one time payment over 36 months). Today that about 63€ a month. So they intend to make 290€ per server minus additional costs for mongodb hosting.<p>Does that jive with how you all figure these things?
This sounds like a joke to me.<p>1- "Hosting for Node.js apps done right": Like everything else is done wrong? That's just weird.<p>2- What does "designed for cloud" mean?<p>3- "Free support"? How gullible do you think we are? At 6e/mo, anyone that believes they're getting any kind of "Free support" is wrong. Or else this service is going to fail big time.<p>Now some constructive criticism:
I see "FTP access". But as a dev, I would have liked to see something like FTPS, SFTP or better yet, SSH.
What are the others doing wrong that these guys are doing right? From the marketing page, it looks to be as simple as Heroku, except I already have an account there, and most of my apps run for free already.
The things I miss in this "done right" approach:<p>- Continuous Deployment: automatic load-balancing, proper termination of instances, all seem to apply without documentation or not?!<p>- Redis: MongoDB for persistent data is fine in many cases but for performance nothing beats a key/value storage (also: some session storage works well with redis)<p>- Where is it hosted? Europe? Unusable for my location :)
"Dev" price:<p>€
6 / month<p><pre><code> 1 app instance
256MB RAM
1GB storage
Unlimited custom domains
FTP access
Free MongoDB database
Free support
</code></pre>
If they also have a transfer limit, then just forget about it :(