A free tier and a basic plan for $5/month
Galaxy should include Mongo though
3 Likes
This is a very interesting idea. My sense is that 4 years ago, there was a growing community of “meteor devs for hire”, but that this seems to have dissipated. If Tiny were to facilitate/lead the re-establishment of ready access to a pool of competent Meteor developers who were available to contract and/or consult on projects, that might, over time, help grow the industrial user base.
2 Likes
Exactly. Still up for doing this and advocate the crap out of Meteor in Europe. I’m technical director of big events like VueJS Amsterdam, Frontend Love and VueJS Roadtrip. We could make such a thing happen for Meteor too…
10 Likes
The beauty of Meteor is that it completely hides complexing on 2 main aspects:
a. server-side programming
b. deployment of a nodejs project
I think that the main thing for Galaxy to provide is a $5/month plan (like Digital Ocean) where anyone can simply deploy a project typing meteor deploy from a terminal. That means Mongo included, of course. If I would be Tiny I’ll make this feature available with a 60 days trial, so I start to pay iff my project is still alive after 60 days, with more months for free to redeem if I invite others to join.
Professional features like k8s and monitoring could be available only in a pro plan.
More command-line tools to access Mongodb on galaxy would be really important because hiding complexity (and containers) is something I would pursue quickly.
The second thing I would do is implement into Meteor what’s missing to make it the perfect PaaS for any application with or without DDP. So making REST very easy to get from Meteor methods and DDP packages for any platform maintained by Tiny are fundamental here.
1 Like
Explizit support for the European General Data Protection Regulation GDPR. I used to host my apps on Galaxy, and was happy enough, until this regulation came along and I found nothing on Galaxy about it. So instead of worrying I switched to a GDPR compliant hoster. End of story.
1 Like
You can find information about GDPR and Galaxy here: https://galaxy-guide.meteor.com/gdpr.html
4 Likes
Hi, this probably have been said already but:
- A way cheaper plan (competitive with mLab + AWS hosting or with Heroku)
- Deploying using mup
- Automated backup of the mongo database
- Cron jobs
- In some case, hosting in Europe or even France (some clients needs solid guarantees on their data, hosting in the US and respecting GDPR is not enough)
Some of those feature might already exists, I didn’t even bother to try out Galaxy given the price. It’s a missed opportunity because I have multiple clients that needs hosting, but each needs a cheap plan, I can’t have one big plan for multiple users.
I don’t need a free tier, because there are already solid competitors regarding free plans (Heroku, Zeit now, AWS 12 months free EC2), I would care more about paid production server.
3 Likes
MeteorPad, or similar, to showcase applications made with MeteorJS
3 Likes
I remember there was lots of waste when there was a free deploy, because lots of us didn’t realize the cost was so high…Could a limit on deployed free apps per account, or at least a $3 / month or small app charge create a natural way to limit apps to actual apps that can help with marketing vs just tinkering around and forgetting to un-deploy…?
1 Like
removing “meteor deploy” was a huge downer and set me on a journey learning a lot about deploying meteor apps. i mostly used heroku from then on. unfortunately, meteor is still a bit painful to deploy. so when I wanted to return on a professional project, willing to pay money for time saving and stability, I realized that galaxy was way too expensive and inflexible, so I learned more about deploying myself.
Bringing back “meteor deploy” and making it easy to scale from prototype testing to business app would be great. Also all the meteor specific features like spotting typical meteor performance probs (this can be a huge time saver). galaxy is still the only meteor specific hoster that I know but I didn’t understand for which customers it’s prices were designed for (probably not for someone like me who creates lots of prototypes, event-based apps, sometimes requiring rapid scalability, does creative coding).
4 Likes
Hello @tomvamos, I don’t know exactly how it was in the past but for sure support is open to questions and we are responding all the questions ASAP (less than 1 business day for sure).
If you need any help please send a support message for Galaxy. 
hi @docforce can you describe better what was happening from Mac? I’m using Galaxy for many years and I already deployed from a Mac many times, curious to understand what was the issue.
Hi @james and @philipmjohnson, premium support is already offered for Galaxy and Meteor itself
See the topics on GALAXY SUPPORT PRICING and METEOR DEVELOPER SUPPORT PRICING on
https://www.meteor.com/pricing
Was getting errors with building more complex packages, likely ones that built binaries, that resulted in code that wasn’t runnable when it reached the Linux machine on the Galaxy side. Galaxy should be doing the builds inside its own Linux environment, rather than building on the local machine and then pushing up. Building on Mac and then running on Linux is a recipe for disaster.
2 Likes
That’s good to know … thanks.
Hi, we read all the comments here and we are considering everything in our next steps on Galaxy.
And yes, one thing I can say for sure, Galaxy is going to receive new features and updates.
17 Likes
Would like to add SourceMaps to the conversation (though I suppose that is more a core Meteor thing rather than a Galaxy specific thing)
2 Likes
Yes, that has been repeatedly mentioned in the other threads.
Hi Tiny. Thanks for taking on Meteor.
I have been developing using Meteor, part-time, since Meteor 1.0.
I’m sort of a lone wolf. I was a c developer (employee) in the 80s and 90s, but had personal projects i wanted to do. In the 90s I developed shareware apps by myself in C then C++ for windows. To distribute the apps, i first used ‘bulletin boards’, but got a website up in straight HTML in 95, then in Drupal around 2001. I learned enough apache and linux that i finally hosted my sites myself in my own basement on a highspeed connection.
To feed me, i did Drupal and C++ consulting work part time, and one of my Drupal projects bogged down just because of complexity. This was just as Meteor came out. I convinced the client to move to Meteor and did a demo in front of their board in 3 weeks, of the basics of their web app - but now re-written in Meteor yet still hosted myself. We immediately moved the whole app to Meteor - for flexibility!
I never got mup to work, but followed the instructions by digital ocean to self-host.
I now have a dozen meteor apps, self-hosted, most of them also ‘tiny’ apps but never considered Galaxy, because i’m a coder for life. I like writing ‘mini-webapps’, mostly demos and scientifc stuff - not mass audience stuff.
I guess I’m probably old school, still do coding for the fun of it, not for profit, so a service to host seemed expensive for my experiments.
Perhaps you could provide a free galaxy service for people that don’t automatically assume they will get 1000 visitors/hour to their sites.
I now have about 12 sites, most non-commercial, so I can’t justify a paid service - but if the service is free for low-traffic sites, you might get people to move, and then they would more likely move to a paid service if they eventually have ‘a hit’.
Two of my experiments now have good traffic, but I’m hosting myself since I now know how to.
Most reasonable people recognize that their chance of having a ‘hit product’ online is often a matter of luck, and will find other free solutions until they need the service - but if they have learned to host themselves, they will never need the service you provide.
But let them host their low-traffic sites for free, and they will move up to your paid service when they need it.
Its the ‘freemium’ model and it works.
6 Likes