Awesome to here.
I’m waiting for it.
Isn’t Meteor now even more popular than ROR (at least on GitHub).
I don’t believe github stars don’t indicate any business value in terms of popularity or market demand.
Compared to meteor stars around 27K, consider PHP with 6K, or wordpress which is also around 6K. Or even worse, NGINX has 300 stars, Apache HTTPD has 1000! Now consider how many apache/nginx + php and wordpress sites and apps out there. Millions! Now, that’s a profitable business.
Github stars only indicate the relative popularity of a piece of technology among other github users, but also only those who care to star repositories.
But business value comes from business popuarity. Demand for apps built with meteor. do not have that market scale yet. Perhaps it will, or it won’t. But it will definitely take of in the enterprise space.
Tech stacks like meteor are only marginal value for broad spectrum providers like heroku, modulus and even tinier business for the likes of google compute etc.
But, I do believe it will find its place and I do say that, ironically, based on github popularity! A stack with that kind of following will definitely get there.
I recently pitched meteor for a business app that would be used in 30 different countries in a multinational pharma company. It was introduced very late in the game and perhaps a little far fetched compared to the very traditional roots of the company IT culture, but it certainly raised some eyebrows and set some expectations with the business stakeholders in such a way that the IT had to enhance their specs including keywords like reactivity. That’s definitely something!
Yeah I know ROR has been around longer so there are more active sites, but the popularity of Meteor as a framework can be used to forecast future trends. Most businesses are rather conservative about adopting ‘new’ technology and tools. Also from a business POV there is a large pool of experienced ROR and PHP developers which makes recruiting less expensive–it was hard for me to find Meteor devs as everyone who has read Discover Meteor and played with Leaderboard thinks they are worth $100-150 per hour (they aren’t!)
But things change. Companies (like mine) are proving the case for Meteor. And more and more companies will want to get eliminate the refresh button from their website because before too long that will make their site feel very outdated.
Isn’t hosting fairly mechanical once the orchestration scripts are written?
A basic 2 servo deployment on Modulus costs $57.60 monthly. I have no idea what kind of overhead costs are involved, with even with just 1,000 customers that’s nearly $60K monthly. If the net profit is just 10% ($12K monthly) it seems like the endeavor has enough potential to attract the attention of entrepreneurs. But I admit I don’t know a whole lot about what is really costs to run a Meteor hosting service.
I’m kind of in line with your reasoning. Where I part is what in terms of volume constitues a viable business.
Hosting, especially managed platform hosting requires dedicated skill sets that often can’t be found within a single person. And then there’s 24/4 around the clock and around the world availability and support.
Let’s say one sets up a team of 5 people to support those 1000 customers. And I believe I’m being very conservative here by assuming 5 is sufficient.
Assuming a redundant setup, online backups, realtime failover mechanisms, let’s say the 1000 customers willing to pay 60K a month have amassed you, as you suggest, 12,000 USD. Rinse away typical business and management expenses and say you have $10K. Then of course there’s taxes involved and that’ll probably leave something around $7K.
That leaves roughly 1500 USD per engineer.
I would not consider that an income worth the effort, the headaches, the constant fear of one of the AWS regions going down for ten hours etc.
I still believe MDG’s vision to offer a platform that provides a platform is much more suited to meteor business potential which I believe would get the lion’s share from forward-thinking enterprises.
ok well I guess if it was a good idea a few people would have done it already. I don’t really have good sense regarding how fragile these things are. I’ve run my own dedicated LAMP servers before. We ran WordPress, Magneto, forums and other php stuff on it, but I don’t like how much time it takes to do upgrades and config firewall stuff. I never want to manage my own server again.
I just see a lot of people hosting their Meteor stuff with MUP and Digital Ocean, so I thought why doesn’t someone who figured that stuff out package it as a service so anyone can deploy like that with a CLI or ‘git heroku push’ style ease. But I didn’t realize most of these people have teams of 4-5 people working to make sure everything doesn’t fall apart.
how fragile these things are.
They are not, well, until they are, where one succumbs cluelessly to their servers’ failure 
But again there are urban legends of network anomalities that finally get discovered to be a forgotten server that’s still running its configured services! I’ve actually witnessed one occassion in a datacenter with hundreds of servers where they got to unplug each server’s network cable to physically identify a server which had been running for years! 
The value that DO proposes to Meteor community is the $5 server. I think it’s popularity is a strong message along the lines of “we love meteor and we’re not able to set aside $6 for my next-facebook-to-be app”
For anyone who stumbles upon this thread through google or anything looking for some justification to use Modulus… I would highly recommend NOT using them. We ran a fairly heavy production app with them and there was issue after issue. It got to the point that we were scared to push new versions to them for fear of it breaking. This is about the worst position to be in when running a production app.
It feels like their build system is so fragile. Support is somewhat slow to get back to you when your app fails to deploy for some reason. We migrated over to running on AWS and have been happier than ever. We should have just used AWS from the start, as when something goes wrong, you can just sort it out yourself. Actually, we haven’t had any issues with our AWS setup.
I cannot believe we spent so much money with Modulus whilst living in fear with them. I have previously recommended them to other meteor devs, but have recently gone back to them and told to not even consider them.
While their offering seems good, and you can actually get going with them pretty fast, you also come across issues very quickly. Our app was offline for around 9 hours a few months ago until modulus devs fixed the build image, which resulted in pissed off customers and lost revenue.
TLDR; Don’t use modulus.