Hello guys, I’m facing a big problem: I have an app which I want to launch as a beta next week. My problem is that I am reaching my limits on the development side but I haven’t found a CTO yet. I’m in a startup accelerator program, which is why I have even less time for the work on my MVP due to other assignments. I just can’t get everything working at once, so I was thinking of not deploying to Microsoft Azure servers and just deploy to Meteor servers, since I know it is easy!
I was wondering a few things though:
Would you consider this ethically ok for a few weeks? I don’t expect more than a few hundred to thousand users in the first weeks (“hopefully”!).
Can the servers handle such a “high” load?
The server should never reset as long as there are users on the server frequently, right?
Can I export my database easily and switch to another server infrastructure once I got deployment to another service working?
Do yourself a favor and spend the $14 for a single servo on Modulus.io, turn on auto-scaling, and get back to customer development
As a relative newbie myself I think I had my first app deployed in about an hour, including SSL setup. Just follow the set up guides and take advantage of their GUI.
It’s far easier than deploying to Azure or any other IaaS provider and you’ll come out with a pretty solid setup for an MVP.
Is it ethical?
Sure. Absolutely. But that’s only because you have absolutely no guarantees. I had a lot simple meteor applications that went dead for a few minutes at random.
The Meteor sandbox is not a place to deploy a professional app, not because it’s wrong, but because it’s unfeasible. Also I’ve accessed my remote database from the command line, but I never tried to export any data from it… Don’t know if it’s possible…
How I solved my issues?
I’ve rented an unmanaged Ubuntu VPS for 100Euros per year, which now I use for all my experiments. The ‘unmanaged’ part is not so bad with meteor since you can simply run meteor --production up there and not messing with configs. All I had to manually set up was an email server (which you can propably avoid by using third party services), and nginx but only after I had to serve multiple node.js apps from the same server
I would also say, it depends on what you will put there. If you don’t have a lot of users and/or you don’t have any kind of agreement with your users that the site will be up for X% of the time, it doesn’t seem to be an issue. And an MVP many times is an unfinished product just to measure users interest.
You can do backups from the DB but you don’t have a guarantee that stuff will stay there, so you should do backups regularly.
You can have an idea of the uptime for a site with almost no traffic on the meteor servers:
Of course atm you don’t have any guarantees for the meteor servers, so it will be just a tradeoff to gain more time and depending on how critical your app is, this can blow up in your face.
Well, honestly, I just need to get stuff up as fast as possible. So I might try modulus or digital ocean. I just want to make sure that I can switch to Azure eventually (hopefully still during beta) because I have 150$ free servers monthly for 3 years. I will be gaining quite some media exposure in three weeks, so I just need to get stuff up and running asap.
I would say Modulus is your best bet to get up and running. You get a month free with them and it is only $15 a month after that. If cost is your worry, use the code ‘METPODCAST’ in your account once you sign up, that should be good for a $25 credit, courtesy of Modulus and the Meteor Podcast.
The issue with using meteor deploy is that there is really no support. I think you would turn to panicking here or on twitter to find someone at MDG to fix things.
