Vultr(cloud servers) always have coupons for a few free months worth of hosting, just for signing up. Of course, rolling your own is a little trickier than using something like Galaxy but youāll save money and gain the experience of doing it yourself.
One quirk with Passenger is that each app gets its own user account(if you do it using Ubuntu). I initially ran into problems with other services using port 80 so I couldnāt start the passenger server. If you go this route, use nginx.
Iāve been using Clever Cloud since May. Iāve been very happy with it. Good backend interface, very affordable, pretty good support when needed. Not Meteor-focused, but their Node container works just fine with the right setup. They can host databases too but Iāve got my database on mLab. Note that Clever Cloud is based in France and only has servers there and in Montreal, Canada.
I tried the DigitalOcean route, but like others have said, Iād rather not be responsible for the upkeep of a server, even though Iāve got some years of devops experience. These new IaaS offerings are so niceā¦
Iāve been doing some tests both with deploying using PM2-Meteor and Passenger on Scaleway. Hereās my initial experience:
PM2-Meteor
PM2-Meteor is probably the best Mup replacement. You do need to install some essentials on your server but once youāve set it up deployment is fast and fluid. There is a tutorial but it is lacking some essential details, so make sure to have a look at these scripts. I especially like fast access to logs on all instances, and that it uses all cores (cluster mode) enabling zero-downtime deploys.
EDIT: Note that PM2 does not support sticky session. Although this doesnāt seem to be a major issue for most app, as far as I read.
Passenger
Their Meteor tutorial is very good but I still did run into many Ubuntu related issues (and you need to have nginx installed prior to Passenger) and issues with Meteor settings.
And man, itās a shitload of work to make your first deploy. After that, yes you can use/write a script to do it for you (they even provide an example), but the initial server setup takes a lot of effort. I cannot imagine having to setup multiple serversā¦
Compared to MUP
Both options require you to have much more knowledge about devops than Mup, but I also feel that Mup is like a black box that either works, or it really doesnāt. Either way you have to learn Nginx to make the setup production-proof.
Personally I think Iām going to use PM2-Meteor from now.
I recently stood up Nginx in from of my Mup/Meteor deployment. I had issues with my site reloading at first, but took out the cache from the Nginx config and that seems to have stop it. Do you have any tips on Nginx config and/or using/managing Nginx in general? And are there any monitoring tools for Nginx that might make my life easer?
Iām actually on Heroku with a project, and I think that the price is really affordableā¦ But you have to pay the DB separatelly (because their internal options arenāt suitable). You have also a bunch of free running-hours to develop the application before releasing in production.
Itās really easy to deploy on Heroku, you set the puildpack, push the code to the git repository and they manage to download everything needed, build and deploy. The only disavantage is that meteor isnāt officially supported so you depend on a third party for the buildpack (but you can fork it and manage it as you prefer).
I would just like to point out, free mLab database works perfectly fine with Galaxy.
Galaxy is still a bit more expensive than NodeChef, but is not quite as expensive as it seems at first glance. I personally do not paying an extra $10-15 just for the convenience in fast deployment without issues.
Our team has been able to easily do daily deployments as well as emergency updates, in our production app, flawlessly.
I must say for the convenience and stability that comes with Galaxy I donāt mind paying up the extra buck. I really think we can complement the MDG team on a great hosting product and I feel its good practice to support them since they give us Meteor which made starting my project possible as a single developer (Which Iām convinced would not have been possible before meteor came along). Thanks to MDG for making my business model work!
Also Atlas is pretty great! I tried compose, mlab and modulus before settling with Atlas. The product quality, ssl and replica setup and refined user access rights that come with Atlas has saved me a considerable amount of time.
I understand that on hobby projects one would consider not spending the extra dollars or on really large project choosing the cheapest hosting options can save lots of cash, but for any medium size project I donāt see why one would spend time on a slightly cheaper host and loose the convenience/stability of Galaxy and Atlas.
Weāre maintaining the integration for Azure App Service which is compatible with Meteor 1.4+ and works through the Native CI system (which can painlessly auto-sync with your remote repository).
The platform is backed by an SLA and provides configurable auto-scaling, zero-downtime updates as well as access to internals (for more advanced architectures such as multi-regional fail-over or A/B testing).
The pricing is similar to Galaxy, but if youāre a start-up: Microsoft offers 3 years of free hosting ($150/month/developer for up to 5 accounts) through their BizSpark program which also includes technical support & complimentary access to Office 365, Windows, SQL Server, etc.
Iām thinking of subscribe to BizSpark, as Iām into a startup, months after saw this ā¦ Iām still impressed that Microsoft just OFFER 3 years of free server, no fees if we leave at the end. Thatās ā¦ crazy, isnāt it ?
Did you had any problem w/ integrating azure, subscribing to BizSpark etc. ?
Even tough I read a lot of time that tried to run Meteor on not special-meteor platform as Galaxy is āprobably not a good ideaā and itās complex, I finally think itās RIDICULOUS to have to rent specific servers, as devs we have to be able to set up a server IMHO.
Besides I donāt get why a VPS is like more than 10 time or IDK less expensive than Meteor-dedicated servers as Galaxy, why donāt just one propose a galaxy-like service which will use on the background DO servers (for instance) but offers an interface and a deployment like Galaxy for easily handle the server.
