Why does an instance that would cost me $5 a month on AWS cost me $26 a month on Galaxy? Are the benefits really THAT significant?
Seriously, compute isn’t ridiculously hard to scale. I just don’t get it.
Take the number of hours you would spend on devops with a $5 AWS instance and multiply it by how much you think your time is worth per hour. That’s how much it should be worth to you.
Whether that’s more or less than the $20 difference depends on how good you are at devops and how much your time is worth. Those two factors tend to be inversely correlated, so unless you can’t afford spending $25 per month, chances are that Galaxy would be worth it for you.
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I think more people would use galaxy if the pricing would seem a bit more fair…
http://joshowens.me/building-your-own-meteor-galaxy-hosting-setup/
Josh states he havent touched his hosting setup since mid december, he can add a server in 5 minutes if needed with this setup.
Deploying is pretty easy with meteor up.
Galaxy just do not give that much plus as it costs for most people, i think.
Basically Josh saves around 150 usd monthly, which seems pretty good, if you take in count that after setup he has not much to struggle with devops.
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You should probably mention that even Josh Owen’s article starts out by saying:
So you want to build your own Meteor hosting setup, eh? Let me just start off by saying this is probably a bad idea.
That said, I’m not sure where you got the $150 number from, but even if that’s the case I don’t think it’s enough to make it worth the time you spend setting it up. Keep in mind that it can also easily cost you ten times that much when your setup goes down and your customers get angry, and that’s not even counting the hours you spent setting it up, fixing it and explaining to your customers why you are running on an architecture you rolled yourself instead of relying on a good hosting provider.
I just don’t see any case where it makes sense to do it yourself unless you can’t afford it or are so big that you can hire a whole devops team and still save money. It’s the same reason companies get really large before they start buying their own hardware and moving off of AWS or Azure.
That said, if you don’t have anything important to host and want to learn how to set up something like that, then it can be a fun project to do.
I’ve been using Galaxy for about a month now, and the only thing I’m not completely satisfied with is that it’s currently only running in the US-east AWS datacenter.
All things said and done, in the end everyone has to make their personal decision as to whether managed hosting is worth it for them. For me it’s an absolute no-brainer, but I understand that for other people it might not be, especially if funds are tight.
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Well you are not alone as there are many threads complaining about the pricing for Galaxy. Especially when it does not come with MongoDB. You have to go set up a free one at mlab. What if tomorrow mlab decides no free MongoDB? You know where I’m going with the cost.
There is not much benefits over setting up your own on a $5/month on Linode/DO. And definitely, there is no benefit to using a managed service like NodeChef for $9/month. Actually NodeChef offers significant benefits since it includes a database. Another example setting up lets encrypt on Galaxy vs NodeChef? Galaxy has like 15-20 steps process which you repeat when the certificate expires while NodeChef is one command and they renew it for you. https://nodechef.com/deploy
Guide: Setting up LetsEncrypt SSL on Galaxy
MDG does not have much to show for the ~26/month starting price.
I find galaxy pricing spot on. Running your own setup is far from the same. The biggest feature for me and why their pricing is worth it is the coordinated version updates. None of the alternatives are able to offer this.
Now if this doesn’t matter for you and/or you’re only running one server instance, then you might as well do it yourself, but it’s completely a personal choice. I still run most projects on AWS, larger projects (anything above 2 instances) I’d almost always move to galaxy. The reason is that the complexity/problems of deploying to more than one server jumps really quickly. At that point galaxy would definitely become cost-effective and I’d prefer ease of mind above the small price-increase. (and as @helfer points out, if you calculate your time doing the deployments yourself, galaxy will probably prove less expensive at that point)
One thing people don’t seem to understand is that galaxy is a premium service. For those only able/wanting to spend 5$/month, this is not for you and indeed for your use-case there probably is no really big difference between galaxy or any of the alternatives.
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From NodeChef website, I read this:
Update your code in production without any downtime. NodeChef coordinates updates by replacing containers with precision to ensure a seamless upgrade experience for all connected clients
Basically there is a cheaper alternative which offers zero downtime coordinated version updates.
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Admittedly I haven’t checked out nodechef. Looking at their pricing I see for a comparable instance you’re paying 28$/month, granted you also get a 1GB db. Sadly deployment isn’t exactly one command.
I haven’t read any decent feedback from nodechef yet, so if you want to give it a shot? I’m sure it’ll help the community greatly if someone did an in depth review of nodechef. (My personal feeling/bias about it is that it’s not yet mature, but it would be great if I were proven wrong)
I use it and I have had no issues whatsoever. You do a quick search in the forums and you notice many developers using it too. And no negative feedback. That sounds like a mature platform to me.
Galaxy has to lower the prices. It used to start at ~15/month and that was fine.
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You do a quick search in the forums and you notice many developers using it too. And no negative feedback.
I don’t know which forums you’re talking about, but if you mean this one, then the thread about them doesn’t back up your claims at all. Apparently nobody uses them for a serious production app and the few people who have said they use them find it to be quite janky. Having DB hosting by the same provider seems like more of a disadvantage in their case because it doesn’t work well. I’d much rather use compose.io or mlabs because those guys know what they’re doing. I assume that that’s the reason Galaxy doesn’t have its own DB hosting (yet).
Considering that a 512 MB instance costs $28 on nodechef compared to $25 on Galaxy, the only reason not to go with Galaxy is if you just want a tiny 128 or 256 MB instance. DB hosting really isn’t an argument, because you can set up a free DB with mlab in no time (it took me about 5 minutes to make an account, create a DB and connect it to my instance running on Galaxy).
If you’re just tying to keep costs down, then keep in mind that they charge per month while Galaxy charges per hour, so if you’re just running a demo for a customer and don’t need to run it all the time, Galaxy will be a lot cheaper. It will also allow you to temporarily scale to more containers when you need it. You pay only for what you use on Galaxy. On nodechef it seems you pay for the whole month, regardless of whether you use the capacity or not.
Galaxy has to lower the prices. It used to start at ~15/month and that was fine
When you say Galaxy has to lower prices, maybe you mean that Galaxy should offer smaller containers? Because otherwise your post makes no sense at all: you’re happy with node chef, which charges $28 for a 512MB container, but you say Galaxy is too expensive at $25.
I have not read any reviews on nodechef been quite janky, considering galaxy’s dashboard is freezing simply on simple SSL certificates upload and also requires a ticket to even use some of its features.
Links to both threads provided here.
When you mention NodeChef’s mongodb does not work well, are you assuming this or you actually have evidence. These claims are based on emotion not facts.
The $28 includes a mongodb database with solid backups, Letsencyrpt SSL certificates (To do this on galaxy, i have to write a book of bash commands which might not even work. Is this feature coming to galaxy anytime soon?).
There is an entire blog post on the NodeChef experience, choosing to ignore it again is simply based on emotion which is understandable since you work for mdg.
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@helfer This is a great answer. It really puts things into perspective.
@marktrang you should factor this into your marketing plans. That’s what analytical minds want to hear.
I think once Galaxy offers autoscaling and makes the case that using Galaxy is more cost-effective than hiring a DevOps team, it will be much more clear as to why anyone would want to use Galaxy.
I just don’t think this has been made extremely clear to developers and prospective clients yet.
EDIT: Just saw the new Meteor website. The Galaxy page makes this super clear now. Well done, MDG. Well done.
@rethinkETL Yes, I work at MDG and I’ve made no attempts at hiding it. I’ve been posting on this forum regularly, and my profile says that I work here. 
I’m using Galaxy for my personal projects (I’m paying the full price) and I would do so even if I didn’t work here.
Talking about full disclosure: Maybe you should disclose that you work for NodeChef? I didn’t bother to check this before, but every single one of your posts on this forum was made to promote NodeChef. There’s nothing wrong with promoting your product, but you should not try to hide the fact that you work for them. That’s disingenuous.
Can you please tell us how you are affiliated with NodeChef?
By the way, everything I said about your product is based on the thread I linked to. They are not my own judgements, I’m simply quoting other people.
I’m sorry if I have offended you in some way, but I really don’t see an advantage for anyone to use your product over Galaxy, except if they need smaller containers. I think others have come to the same conclusion, regardless of their affiliation.
I hate to do this, but you registered and posted from the same IP as @knana, who says he runs BizDev at NodeChef.
My guess would be that you and @knana are the same person.
Have you heard of proxies yet? We share the same office infrastructure as startups in a co working space. Maybe that’s why I said I like them?
@helfer @RethinkETL we’re on on the same team here. Galaxy or not, we’re using and developing with Meteor.
Galaxy has room for improvement, mainly in autoscaling and pricing. NodeChef isn’t perfect either.
I don’t think it’s worth the argument about who’s affiliated with what.
It’s really about what’s better and why.
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@mz103 I agree! This thread should be about what’s best for Meteor users. If there’s a better hosting option out there than Galaxy, then people should use that.
I’m not sure if we’re on the same team however, because @rethinkETL seems to have been misleading people on the forum by posting what looked like recommendations from a community member when in fact he is best buddies with the folks at NodeChef (or is actually their BizDev person, as the evidence suggests). So at the very best I’d take what he says with a big grain of salt.
If you try out Node chef, it would be great if you could post about your experience here, so other people looking for hosting options can make a more informed decision!
FWIW: I tried to find out where NodeChef is registered as a company and who is behind it, but I couldn’t find anything. They’re making it extra difficult, because their domain registration uses an anonymizing proxy. Make of it what you want, but I’d be very wary of giving them my credit card number or any other personal information.
@rethinkETL @knana I think a bit more transparency about NodeChef would help everyone. Is there any place where potential customers can find out more about the company and who is behind it? Who owns it, who runs it, and where is it registered?
Firstly I am also using galaxy, for demos and testing mostly.
I think it is a good product, and suits well my current use case.
I am just considering other alternatives (mainly self made devops), because in production the cost of running the app will matter a lot more for me.
My assumption that Josh spares 150 per month with his current setup vs galaxy is based on this: he runs 2 20$ (2gb ram 2 cpu) servers + 1 5$ for the nginx load balancing. That’s 45$ per month. The equivalent container size in galaxy (as far as I see) is the double (2gb 2,1ecu wich comes for approx 100$ montly) so with galaxy he is at 200/month (4 times the costs if you do it for yourself).
Please correct me if I am wrong.
So for me, I can afford paying 4-5 times more when the app runs on small scale, because galaxy has some nice features that make life easier (i pretty like the stop/restart functionality and speed), but, if I finish with the development of my app and will need to run it on a higher scale, I just wont be able to pay so much more.
I am just taking my time writing this, because i think more people would use galaxy if it prices where more comparable with the cloud hosting prices. Because now (at least for me) the prices points me in a direction to setup a self hosted setup somewhere (for example https://hosthatch.com), and I see others also like so in the forum (this topic is also born because of that).
If the prices where setup a bit more friendlier, there would be no such question for most people, I think.
Note: these are my thoughts, maybe galaxy costs so much that going down with prices is not an option
Note2: I am not working for meteor or a meteor competitor 
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Started using Galaxy this weekend. Took me about a day to get everything set up that was needed. So far so good.
https://www.meteor.com/galaxy/signup
What confuses me about the pricing is that I am being charged for the standard when I want the double? How does that work? When do we get the RAM and ECU increase? Does the price just go up when the app uses more memory?