$0.035 /Container/Hour

Could someone please explain how Container/Hour pricing works?
I am thinking about Galaxy.

Thanks

Your title says it all, it starts at $0.035 per container hour. This means that if you’re container is running for one hour, you’ll be charged $0.035 at the end of the month. If it runs for 100 hours, you’ll be charged for $3.5 at the end of the month.

You’re only charged for containers that are running.

A Galaxy/Meteor app can have multiple containers.

There are various container options that go up to $0.28 per hour.

All details are on the Galaxy Pricing page.

Thank you Stan, for your quick reply. Can you please elaborate.
Say I deploy a meteor app. How do I know how many containers it uses? When is the container running, is it when a user is using the app or just that it is installed there?
Maybe you have some links where I can learn more about containers & hours?

It tells you this in the admin, and you can adjust it up/down with the click of a button:

When the application is deployed and started, you are billed (whether people are using it or not). If you don’t want to be billed you can stop your app using the admin.

For more info check out the Galaxy FAQ.

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When you deploy one container is running by default.
You can change the number, up and down of the containers on the galaxy admin.

if the container is running (think of it as computer or server switched on) you app is aviable.
If it is not running you app cannot be accesed.
You will be charged for the hours you app was runned on the container (you can pause the app, manually on the admin, if the app is paused 0 usd is charged if I get i right, the you can switch it back on.)

I’m curious, does Galaxy support auto-scaling, if it doesn’t, will it in the future?

see Galaxy Auto Scaling

If I got it right, the price at the end of the month will be about 25$, right ? We have 730 hours / month.

If so, Digital Ocean seems a better choice for beginning user regarding price.

To be honest, DO or Hosthatch (whoever you get your VPS from) seem like the better option for startups. They offer scaling in the form of adding RAM / CPU’s with the click of a button as well.

Galaxy does seem great for the ease-of-use and I can see a market for it to certain individuals or businesses. However, if you’re just wanting to get your app out there I think VPS providers are the way to go!

Yes, if you use 1 ‘compact’ conatainer runnin for a month 0-24 it is estimated for 25$/month, see below.

Yes I think you get approx the dame power on DO for 5$ .
Galaxy is cool in my opinion if you have demos for a client, or want to show it for someone for example: it is easy to turn on and off manually.
An other use case if you do not want to loose time on dvops, but I still sthink it is a bit overpriced.

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You should also consider NodeChef https://www.nodechef.com/meteorhosting.

Cool thing here is that it includes DB hosting, so you won’t need another provider for this. Galaxy doesn’t, and on DO you would have to setup this yourself (incurring additional costs, if you want to run the DB separately).

Disclaimer: I’m not using NodeChef myself at the moment, because I am on AWS and Compose. So I don’t have any experiences with it yet. But as NodeChef is offering an all-in-one-package including the DB, I am considering to switch to it as soon as my AWS free tier is not enough or runs out.

IMHO, the Galaxy pricing would be ok if it included the DB as well.

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The cost of setting up your own Mongo instance isn’t much to be honest. I set up Mongo on a $7/mo Hosthatch server and it runs flawlessly. In fact, memory and CPU usage is negligible at the moment while the db is still relatively small (500mb or so). WiredTiger helps with that though and time will tell how scalable mongo is when it’s the only thing on the server…

are u using openVz or KVM?
if I understand well opneVZ is enough for node and mogo.

I switched to Modulus.io, lots of metrics that galaxy wants to charge you for and has mongodb hosting with account setup.

It was very easy to setup and deploy from CLI. “modulus deploy” from within your app folder.

You can pic your RAM size and CPU count with a click. You get $15 credit when you setup.

OpenVZ is what I’m using. The specs are better than DO and I’ve found the CPU’s to be far superior. I recommend them! The only issue is they’re using an old kernel, so you can’t use Docker. You’d have to go with KVM for that.

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This is probably a dumb question, but can multiple apps be served/hosted from 1 container? Say I have 5 demo apps I want to run simultaneously using 5 different domains. They’re all small and use the same stack and setup. How many containers would I need?

You’d need 5. Self hosting apps (do, aws, etc.) you can run multiple ones on one server, but not on galaxy.

Here’s an impressive thread about running multiple small apps on one tiny server: Uploaded 18 meteor apps to single VPS - and it works! :)