> With all the buzz and hype around Node JS, it seems reasonable to think that there’d be plenty of cloud providers out there offering Node JS hosting services.<p>Node hosting is not your grandpa's Rails hosting anymore— deploying Node is much easier. If you want to be really quick and deploy to the cloud, take AWS and you are done in 13 steps:<p><a href="http://www.tulek.org/2011/03/08/installing-node-on-aws-linux-ami/" rel="nofollow">http://www.tulek.org/2011/03/08/installing-node-on-aws-linux...</a>
(just one example showing how easy it is)<p>Maybe the simplicity is the reason that there's just no business modell for one-click-hosters because it's too easy. The added value putting some wrapper around AWS is too small to establish a dedicated business.<p>And BTW: check Rails automated hosting providers like Heroku: there're just a very few and Rails is there for 7-8 years now! There're just EngineYard, Brightbox, Heroku and maybe two more. And you definitely need automated hosting with Rails like Heroku or you die. Or check Java hosting, I don't know any one-click-hoster for Java and the JVM. If you want the classic PHP and LAMP stack hosting where you put files via FTP on a web server <i>you</i> are not the right target audience for Node.<p>> Where Are The Community Meet-ups?<p>Node.js meetups are often integrated in local JS meetups; with conferences it's similar—a JSconf heavily covers Node as well.<p>> As a rule, Node JS’s target audience probably doesn’t know enough to safely and securely run their own Internet-connected servers.<p>Sorry, but this is a stuck-in-the-mud view on hosting web apps. With Node borders between web server and app server blurred. Node devs have to know more about deploying and hosting when they code in Node because it's integral to Node (Node is more low level than other stuff). A dedicated sys admin or an automated environment like Heroku is nice but you won't die without one and AWS for example IS already managed hosting and that's all you need. And if you would have your personal sys admin—what should he do? Look that you created the http server one liner in Node right or that he knows how to scale your Node app by modeling how nodes and childs interact with each other? No <i>that's</i> exactly the Node dev's jobs, that makes Node so special. If you face heavy traffic it makes sense to dedicate one engineer just to hosting and scaling but until then AWS or Nodejitsu is your friend.<p>Server vulnerabilities usually come with complex standard deployments like LAMP stacks, Wordpress installations etc. The less you have on the server the safer it will be. The OS stack comes from you hosting provider like AWS, is managed and is safe and the rest (Node) is so simple and little that you get it managed yourself.<p>> We’re just outside London, which is a veritable hive of startup activity these days.<p>London, a hive of startup activity?<p>> I’ve recently built a product in Node JS, and it was a very positive experience<p>If you really liked it and if you agree that there's is a lively ecosystem for Node (just check all the 9,000 modules, <i>this</i> is also the ecosystem) why don't you just help/contribute/improve Node's ecosystem instead of ranting (or kind of)?