For a small-scale app, your mongoDb can run perfectly on the same VPS. The only thing you have to do is make sure a MongoDb-server is installed on the VPS, and tell Meteor to use is through an environment-var.
Getting a Ubuntu VPS image running securely on something like Digital Ocean is the hardest part. Getting MongoDb running is relativly easy.
Downside is theoretical uptime and redundancy: your dB is running on a single instance, and you’re responsible for backups yourself .
At the moment I’m running an app on a self-hosted VPS, including MongoDb on the same instance( a 768MB ram 1vCPU, 10GB SSD instance on iwstack, which is 2.88 Euro/Month. It’s a small bussiness app for about 80 users. ( Meteor 1.3 with Mup (not mupx). Backups are 2x a day to an offsite location with cronjob.
Your absolutely right…but my experience of operating outside of the few blessed OECD countries is that most SMB’s have/pretend to have severe cashflow problems.
Its not uncommon to pay in kind, rather than cash… i.e. $100k of TV advertising ‘paid for’ in paint/office equipment.
Simplifies administrative burden and reduces tax liabilities.
I think the backups are the most important part. The app can go down and we can deploy into alternate VPS even have a secondary VPS as redundancy but if the data is loss, that’s a bigger issue.
Well, you can get a DO server and get it running for around $5, but that’s going to possibly have the headaches of setting the server up yourself, as well as scaling.
I recently deployed on Galaxy for the first time, and it was a very pleasant experience.
Galaxy is the most “convenient” way - may seem a bit pricey at ~$28 a month, but you can literally deploy it in minutes. Updates to deployment should be completed in less than 5 minutes.
Some might make it sound as if database is an issue, but you can use the mLab free plan. 500MB is a pretty decently sized application.
I’ve had app servers in the past that were ~$20 a month, so $28 isnt bad, especially considering Galaxy deploys to AWS, and combined with mLab makes it much more scalable than a DO server.
If you need more than a free mLab server, that means either your application is successful enough to have income to cover the (fairly low) costs, or you are using a business application, in which case you shouldn’t try to pinch pennies on a business application, and $28 a month + database hosting is nothing for a real business.
With that said, while I do wish there was a “hobbyist” hosting option for Galaxy around the $5-10 price range, I think Galaxy is extremely reasonable for any “serious” Meteor applications.
yes galaxy its easy, reliable, scalable, but that won’t sell to my boss wen the current framework we are using is running ok (response time, cpu usage), scales, is reliable, cheap as it is running on AWS.
Sadly for the moment I failed to convince my company to use Meteor due to mongo, moving to a different framework (maybe sails or feathers), will pause my efforts on using meteor and wait for a version (1.5?) that is db agnostic (bye mongo) and more integrated with apollo to use dynamodb, so I can fill all the ticks my boss is looking for in a new framework.