Meteor for very small/light websites?

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Well, some unsolicited advice from someone who’s been through it:

Building small static sites won’t really help you get bigger application development jobs, since they’re not really good references (might even work counterproductive). Plus, you’ll end up with a lot of smaller clients who will still expect support. If you’re busy building apps in a few months/years do you still want to deal with supporting these small sites you’re building now?

Getting bigger application jobs is hard for a starter, but there are lots of agencies that connect freelancers and enterprises (most enterprises only hire freelancers through such agencies anyway). They do take a slice of your pay, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles. At least until you can build up a decent resume.

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Meteor is realy greate for real time apps , but you need to choose the front end framework carefully.

Because if you are building a small website it must be super fast at the initial load and especially angular 2 with meteor is so bad at initial load and file size.

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First thing: I mean no offence.

I see this myth being peddled over and over. My experience, as well as that of other developers (with huuge, modular, multi-service Meteor apps), is that Meteor is actually easy to deploy.

There are several Docker solutions out there that work, or for those with a more traditional approach: meteor build > scp into the box > have Tengine load balance with session affinity > have PM2 manage the processes. Automate all that with a couple of Bash lines. Better yet, copy / paste / deploy: https://github.com/ramezrafla/meteor-deployment

Cannot speak about Galaxy, but after a quick search, bar some external events (i.e. Amazon S3 going down) it seems like people are happy with the service quality there.

There’s also Xervio (ex-Modulus). We still have an app there, soon to be retired, that was built with meteor 8.x. We redeployed a couple of months ago. Not a single issue.

Surely, it’s not the same as LAMP, FTP and forget, but the resulting product is not the same either :slight_smile:

Kind regards

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While learning meteor I have used to build a blog site along with static pages. It was so simple and easy to use with the defaults of iron router and blaze.

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Regarding hosting, I’ve had good luck with heroku. Very simple to deploy using git and the horse buildpack (https://github.com/AdmitHub/meteor-buildpack-horse).

You can get started with a free account and then scale up.

My day job keeps me from doing development work full time, but I’m having fun with meteor as a hobby. I used to work for an Internet consulting company (back in the 1990’s); graduated from college in 1991 with a degree in computer science. I’m really enjoying deploying with git as opposed to ftp the way we did it way back then.

The combo of gitlab and heroku and meteor is working out really well for the hobby projects I’m doing now, and I could see those supporting a freelance shop very nicely. If you want to do anything interactive and creative with your web sites, then I find meteor is a nice framework.

WordPress is great for your basic blogs and business web sites, but when you want to explore ideas and especially if you want to have a web app that works on mobile, tablet and desktop I’m really enjoying meteor with bootstrap to provide a responsive and reactive web application.

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I have another perspective. Static sites and CMSes often become apps. Imagine a photographer who wants a website to show her photos. Sounds like a job for WordPress. But now the client is unhappy with how photos are uploaded and arranged into galleries. “Isn’t there an easier way?” she asks. “There are too many tedious steps and it takes much longer than it should.” So you spend a few days playing around with various plug-ins trying to find the perfect photo gallery solution. Everything has good points and bad points, so you try to find something that gets you close then you spend a few days hacking it for your special needs.

Now the client has a new request: she wants each photo to have a direct link. The gallery plug-in you were using doesn’t support this, so you have to spend another week rewriting everything to accommodate this request–in $PHP = :poop:;

How she wants a private client-area so her customers can login to review and provide feedback on their photos which they don’t want to be public. Lots more custom programming. WordPress has the basic framework for accounts, but you need to write some code to allow her to assign individual galleries to different clients and a way to make galleries private.

Now she has a couple more requests: she needs a way to bill clients and to deliver high-res finals when they pay. She also wants a way to bill clients for photo retouching services. There are plenty of ecommerce plug-ins, but after many days of auditioning plug-ins and playing around with configuration settings, lightboxes, shopping cart and payment solutions, again, we can’t get exactly what we want without a ton of custom PHP programming. We decide she really just needs an application and start to rebuild the application in Meteor.

So now instead of building on months of work in WordPress, and leveraging that value, we are essentially throwing it away and starting over with a more flexible framework which allows us to build and deliver exactly what we want to make.

A copywriter wants a blog to showcase his writing. Then he wants client’s to be able to submit their jobs and get a quote.

A guy in Japan uses his WordPress blog to sell tickets to sumo events. He too quickly runs into frustrating limits as he tries to hack WordPress into the application he needs: an ecommerce solution where he can list events on a calendar.

A real estate agent wants a WordPress to list rental properties, then all sorts of custom search filters and map views. Later he wants to turn it into a multi-vendor platform so property owners’ can add and manage their own listings.

A travel company uses WordPress as a homepage, but now needs an app to sell custom tour packages.

I’ve seen it happen over and over: websites and blogs become apps. And Meteor is a much better tool for making apps than WordPress with it’s cookie-cutter solutions and rigid database model.

WordPress isn’t even just a great platform for blogs anymore. The rise of serverless, static site generators powered by backends like Contentful have changed the game–allowing much more control over both frontend design and backend data-models.

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That’s an interesting and valuable insight.

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I really hate Wordpress. For static sites I either use a JAMStack approach or use ProcessWire for a more fully fledged CMS.

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I’ve tried Meteor for websites when I was learning and it’s an overkill. Meteor is lovable as a “build-tool” for static websites and it’s integration with Galaxy is very neat and convenient, you can have your “Hello World” webpage in 5 minutes flat.

Alternative hosts like now.sh also do the job but you have to learn new stuff. However, CDN integration, SEO stuff, and other such stuff is a bit convoluted.

Meteor is built for apps first and websites second methinks.

Over time, I’ve just shifted all my websites to https://www.squarespace.com/. It’s a very powerful CMS and the templates are just plain gorgeous. It costs a bit but integrates and manages CDN, etc. so you don’t have to think about it. If you want to get to your MVP quick then use squarespace for the website and meteor for the app.

PS: Wordpress is like a clunky juggernaut.

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I’d go with gatsby and a CMS saas

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some new interesting developments

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+1 we just started building a set of landing pages in Gatsby with Semantic-UI-React

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Any difference with Graphcool?

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different concept. It’s a headless CMS with a web UI for content mgmt. LIke Contentful but using GraphQL instead of REST API

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I can’t agree with you more about not liking Word press for static sites.

JAMStack rocks.

I myself really like Hugo

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https://vuepress.vuejs.org/

VuePress