I have never used MUP to deploy Meteor, I never liked it conceptually.
I have never used Galaxy because it started out outrageously priced and had scaling issues and they’re just running Nginx on AWS anyway…how hard can that be?
At least… I’ve never used them for myself. I’ve provided plenty of support for both.
I have an old Meteor Server AMI for AWS. I built it from scratch and did it very well. I also heavily documented it. I sort of kept it secret because I figured since I was the only person in the world (seemingly) who had figured out how to properly serve a Meteor app I should probably be able to easily give Galaxy and Modulus a run for their money.
But… then I ran out of money. Having worked for 2 years with Meteor, I never was able to garner any support or participation in my projects, so I had to move on for a while. I am writing Meteor again, and working towards my goals but aiming at actual Meteor developers is not really the target anymore.
Therefore, I shall gift you all with the following link… http://meteorserver.idometeor.com
I worked on it for two months after MDG killed the free hosting, and then I worked on the documentation for two months. Then I worked on Meteor code for six months…
The AMI and related scripts have not been updated in a long while… but neither has my production server with about a dozen Meteor apps and they’re all still sitting there doing there thing just fine (running Meteor versions 1.1, 1.2 & 1.3). It works pretty well for Meteor 1.2 and you can nurse by hand easily for more recent versions.
I’m not trying to sell my AMI…it’s set as cheap as they would let me (and free for two weeks) and I rarely check my subscriber logs because they’re always empty anyway. 
But, it is usable. I had a subscriber or two… lol.
Regardless, if you read that whole page in the link above I promise you will learn a more than you really wanted to know about how to serve Meteor on AWS with Nginx & Phusion Passenger & your own Mongo - complete with all the related things a business would need like SES email tips, etc.
Using this method for several years, I cannot fathom how in the world MDG gets by telling people to use one app per instance and to make it the smallest instance possible. Ummm…I guess that’s where they get their best markup %? Once you read that doc you’ll understand why I’ve bitched about Galaxy in the best.
Phusion Passenger has been the best kept Meteor secret ever… but a lot of people have adopted their methods now so it is a moot point. I suppose they’re the only ones in the world who actually figured out how to serve Meteor properly… obviously I just happened to be one of few Meteor people who found it early.
Long story short… I have the following things on my free-time agenda:
- Fully updating the AMI stack
- Republishing the AMI in an additional scaling version (I mostly provide freelance devop support for scaling issues)
- Creating public docker & docker swarm configs
- Creating public CloudFront distribution
- Updating the scripts to support any version of Meteor (conceptually done) - currently needs one word updated in a script to support more recent version
I wrote some super sweet scripts for managing the whole affair which can be found @ http://github.com/idometeor/amazon-scripts (probably should have called it nginx-passenger-scripts). They’re also quite well done (but maybe not done), imho.
I never want to publish things until their done…but when is anything ever done? lol
If there we’re raising funds for outdated projects, I could be persuaded to move those items up my priority list. 
The only problem I ever had with this setup is, I think, a limitation with Nginx (at least the OSS version). I tried using a Meteor settings file over 300 lines of JSON long and Nginx puked. I am not a big fan of Meteor settings file for production anyway, I think all that should be in the database… but it does have it’s use I suppose. Anyway, that was just a really ridiculous experiment, so I just moved on to the db method.
I do have a complete set of instructions on how to compile the full stack from source on Amazon Linux if anyone is nerdy enough and tenacious enough to wanna try … better to ping my Meteor bot on Twitter (he’ll let me know…and talk back if in good mood :>), as I don’t get much time to come here 
Could Gmail this handle as well I suppose.
2018 is going to be a big year for my Meteor projects, I anticipate being able to spend the first few months finishing and publishing my previous work and I’ve been writing Meteor code again for a few months now.
P.S. I’m not trying to raise funds. Just providing some enlightenment at this point.
