For those of you who currently looking for a way to autoscale, have you checked out this package? https://github.com/pathable/meteor-galaxy-auto-scaling
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Also, regarding a tool for separated monitoring, thereās this tool by @zodern https://github.com/monti-apm/monti-apm-agent
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@hherrmann
I disagree with your assessment that companies would not get locked (after all itās AWS). Many companies with a deep stack use all sorts of secondary sites (e.g. micro-sites) for internal (and sometimes) external services. IT teams often live in silos and donāt have access to the core hosting dev team that easily (or that team is focused on mission-critical deployments).
If a secure well-vetted hosting platform that is zero-maintenance is available they could easily get corporate approval for it. There is a strong business case for this kind of solution.
@harry97
I can tell you we would never use such a package. It has to be part of the platform. Thatās the goal. If we have to manage it ourselves, it reduces the value of the hosting platform ā which is supposed to be set-it-and-forget-it. There is tremendous business value for that
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Hello ramez, your case is surely also valid but should not be stated as exclusive.
Sure you have all right and I encourage to disagree, with the purpose of placing different opinions, which is key to best frame the strategical target. (To relate my input; my experience and practice in large companies prime activity IT in past 40 years (yes, old guy, started coding at ETHZ on punchcards, despite mostly management&architecture never lost grip on cool tech stacks, reason of my strong sympathies/support to meteor.
Also since I have experienced a large period in IT history and how, which items evolve or do not evolve). I clearly believe there is the same risk (as I had mentioned few years ago in a post at a similar junction/crossroad of meteor) that exclusive hosting, cloud-service will not allow to fully scale.
It was/is one of the strategy key criterionās in my job. Particularly in the fast changing times to āprevent lock-inā. In the past there was the saying āyou never get fired for choosing IBMā, very many companies were locked in to IBM (still today with heavy legacy stacks - and massive code volume).
I see continued high potential in Meteor and would consider three strategical vectors to not miss:
-
Become the top (fully dominant) stack for prototype, stage 1,2, alpha/beta design and development
The stack which does dominate the starting stage can further influence the full scaling (hosting of applications, micro-macro services etc., supported via well defined/conditioned free hosting as outlined in various posts here already) -
Provide full scale production service - Tiny hosting/cloud
-
Provide flexibility to change 2 to another provider (docker etc.)
The very clear strength of meteor is on 1(-2), other companies will continue to dominate the high-end hosting/cloud service AND ITāS TECH EVOLUTION (here Meteor should best adapt, stay relevant). Tiny may gain major portion of the revenue via services (experts to optimize and help
move from 1 to 2/3 (and between them), subscribe community skills/contracts 
Also perform some UCase friction analysis should be done āfullā stacks such as .net
(learn from and minimize direct clash but clear alternative - DIFF/GAP table etc. used for marketing)
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I agree with lots of the ideas here, particularly the OP and @awatson1978. For us the priorities would be:
- Improve the price/performance ratio. I donāt mind paying a premium over what a T2/T3 nano or micro costs but I donāt want to pay 2 or 3 times as much for something than has much worse performance.
- Security. Please add TFA and also add a secrets store for the settings - which can then be accessed/updated like @awatson1978 suggested.
- Debugging/Profiling: All the stuff @veered suggested.
- APM: I would try to make the innards of Meteor a bit easier to plug into so people can use the APM of their choice. If Tiny then went and created a modern APM solution that would be great too but maybe the first step is to make it easy to get at the internals.
We left reluctantly, so weād be more than happy to come back if there were improvements 
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Biggest problem weāve had is meteor deploy being broken in Gitlab CI/CD scenario. Also no ability to deploy from Mac, have to be inside a Linux machine when doing a deploy otherwise we get errors at Galaxy runtime.
- Return of free plan in addition to paid ones.
- Return of all .meteor.com web-sites (I am sure MDG has a backup), it is okay to put a lot of advertising for monetization there. No hoster (and MDG was a hoster) would make such move like MDG did. But it is never late to say āI am sorryā ). Of course, I understand that half of them would be outdated but it is someoneās work and effort.
- Return of ability to magically post your web-site online.
Let us make Meteor magic again )
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I actually had 6-8 galaxy containers continuously for a few years, with a huge bill of like $400 a month, and switched to mup eventually to save the company money. Iām sorry guys, I am just glad I was able to support MDG for as long as we could hold out. Iām actually happier with mup in the end because itās just a lot FASTER. Everything on Galaxy is SLOW SLOW SLOW.
Galaxy is adequate, but I never truly loved it (especially considering the price). We need to transform it to be a magical leap over mup, even after you account for the initial investment setting up mup. What can you do to provide that?
- Start with similar pricing to DO - Make people think āshould I even bother learning mup?! Itās not really going to save any moneyā This is going to immediately bring you closer to your goal; adding to the cost is going to make it harder to be a leap over mup.
- Simple mongodb hosting - But, donāt make the same mistake by boosting the price on what is really a simple server. IMO mongodb is super easy to set up, even accounting for making it production-ready. Much easier than node apps which are riddled with āgotchasā. I could add this to galaxy in a matter of months. Low risk, high reward for you guys.
- SPEED needs to be addressed for every single last operation from sluggish to INSTANT!
- Just echoingā¦ Leverage Galaxy to provide free hosting again. This will help user acquisition!
- I donāt want to go into galaxy ever. Galaxy should replace our IT guy.
OR JUST DONT?!1
Honestly Iām not sure Galaxy even helps people pick meteor to begin with, itās not like hosting and deployment isnāt covered already. Unless galaxy offers a free tier, it doesnāt really help get developers to use meteor.
Honestly if I were tiny I wouldnāt bet on Galaxy but I would explore other options that leverage the advantages of meteor itself. Iād make a remote team of skilled programmers that were available for contracting along with a good sales team that can drive meteor adoption. Manufacturing and defense markets are in sore need of reactive data, and thousands of startups are in need of modern sophisticated web apps.
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I have used Galaxy for a few projects and I liked it very much. The UI is nice, assigning SSL certs is great and I love not having to do SSR because of prerender.io.
The reason I left was that it was just so expensive. All my apps are now hosted on the Vultr platform, using MUP to deploy. Itās slightly more work to deploy and update my apps, but so much cheaper (especially because I can use one server to host multiple apps). All-in, the cost is about 10% of what I was paying on Galaxy.
That said, Iād love to move back to Galaxy, especially if it supports the long-term development of Meteor. My preferences are:
1 - Much cheaper pricing
2 - Autoscaling
3 - Inclusion of APM as standard
And, just to provide a different opinion to some of the other voices in this thread: I really donāt think that itās important for Galaxy to provide database hosting (itās so easy to use an external service for this), and I donāt think itās important to have free deploys either.
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I keep a token project on Galaxy to support the community. For me to switch to Galaxy wholesale Iād need a pricing tier that is competitive with the $7/mo heroku base (which is often faster for me than Galaxy).
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I agree with @mrlowe. Iām right now using Netlify for static pages which has a very low curve to join, because it starts for free. Heroku same thing. Free tier is awesome and the basic tier just 7,- a month.
There are a couple of features really important here:
Not Meteor only
Companies use much more tools then Meteor and mostly have a requirement to host everything on the same provider. Even if it means that there is some overhead in deploy steps.
Containers / the ability to go custom
A pre-fab Meteor container is awesome, but most Meteor apps are accompanied by other node apps.
Cloud functions
Like Netlify, having a way to offload small tasks to the cloud would be awesome.
Static hosting
An easy way to deploy assets (including the meteor bundle) to a static area which could also be managed by Galaxy.
CI and CD with Git repos
Awesome integration with Github, Bitbucket and Gitlab like Netlify has.
Online and offline presence
VueJS proves that a strong community is key to success. Proper documentation, meetups, marketing. Shear presence. Make sure that companies gain trust by saying: āWe are here and we stick around, this is our roadmap, hereās how you can contributeā
A proper SLA
Its all about trust
Competitive pricing
With the above features in mind it would become a good choice again to use Galaxy. But only if the pricing is right.
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YES PLEEEEAAASE!
It is moronic that this has not been implemented yet. Itās 2019 for crying out loudā¦ 
A free tier and a basic plan for $5/month
Galaxy should include Mongo though
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This is a very interesting idea. My sense is that 4 years ago, there was a growing community of āmeteor devs for hireā, 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.
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Exactly. Still up for doing this and advocate the crap out of Meteor in Europe. Iām technical director of big events like VueJS Amsterdam, Frontend Love and VueJS Roadtrip. We could make such a thing happen for Meteor tooā¦
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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 Iāll 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 whatās 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.
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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.
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You can find information about GDPR and Galaxy here: https://galaxy-guide.meteor.com/gdpr.html
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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 didnāt even bother to try out Galaxy given the price. Itās a missed opportunity because I have multiple clients that needs hosting, but each needs a cheap plan, I canāt have one big plan for multiple users.
I donāt 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.
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