@morganjackson, us-east is just to start. It is architected to run in multiple regions and we heard loud and clear during Early Access that this is important for many apps. There is a little bit more work to do before we enable additional regions, and it may not be the next thing we do, but it’s coming.
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We are working on this.
Matter of fact, these are connected. One of the reasons we started with the commercial packages is that many of those customers don’t want a database included. They either have one already, or they have special requirements better handled by the database provider experts.
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The problem here is not that it is too pricey for enterprise companies that are interested in Galaxy. The problem is that the whole paradigm of Meteor framework is catered towards startups and people that are early stage. Enterprise people(or past seed stage startup) will never use a monolithic frame work to run their services.
Galaxy pricing and target customer does not align with who the framework is marketed towards, which is startups.
correct me if i am wrong.
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Oh awesome, so you’re saying that there will be plans where everything comes included? Database, app server, etc?
When you’re building a startup you want the least friction possible. I hope Galaxy can fit that bill.
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You can think of it that way, but we cut the containers out of large EC2 instances and don’t track CPU credits the way micro instances do. We can adjust the actual instance mix depending on workload.
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While I’m looking forward to a price level that works better for my project, this is a smart business move. Very smart.
The right approach is to build the right product and then “ride the cost curve” down. Not the other way around. As an example, Apple has been doing this for years. Start at the higher end and move down from there.
I think MDG knows what they’re doing here.
If anything, this increases my confidence in MDG.
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Chill out Mate! MDG have already said they are working on more affordable plans.
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They did: http://info.meteor.com/blog/announcing-meteor-galaxy
What about a free option? We’ve always offered free hosting to every Meteor developer through our meteor deploy feature. It’s never going away. Now that we’ve had a chance to shake out key parts of Galaxy’s technology stack with large production apps, we’re ready to transition that free meteor deploy service to Galaxy. We’ve already started on that work, so that every developer can use Galaxy free of charge for simple apps, or purchase smaller plans for projects that aren’t a fit for a full commercial plan.
Well why didn’t they just say so? 
On their announcement page, the word affordable and free is non-existant , hence my worry.
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On the pricing page:
Subscriptions for individuals are coming soon.
And on the announcement page you linked to, free is mentioned a few times, as well as:
We’ve already started on that work, so that every developer can use Galaxy free of charge for simple apps, or purchase smaller plans for projects that aren’t a fit for a full commercial plan. (emphasis mine)
So don’t panic. 
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I own a startup and I think this is excellent pricing.
Our hosting costs are currently near $200 / month. We have not thought about scaling up for users yet as we’re not fully public yet. Our devops tasks depend on what we are doing, but they range from 0 to 10 hours in a given month.
Now consider that the lower-end of a developer rate is around $75/hour, that’s anywhere up to $750/month for devops. When I consider $495 for trusting the MDG to be the best devops guys around for Meteor apps, and they take care of scaling and they give me a 1-hour SLA - it really is a no-brainer like @gschmidt said!
You can bet that we will be moving to Galaxy the second we go public becuase that means we have more time to grow a product than to sit and waste time researching how to scale, to monitor and then to implement and maintain all these solution!
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I hate to say it, @debergalis, but Meteor’s track record as being an a la carte platform is just not what it’s known for. MDG hasn’t paved the way to alternate databases or an asteroid.js-like client-only bring-your-own-DDP approach, so its a hard sell I think to say it’s now an advantage to host your database in a separate data center, over network hops, recieving a separate bill for it, and only get middle tier style DevOps for $595/mth.
I just don’t see awareness growing at the rate it’s needed for me to believe that, in Chicago IL, you’ll have more than 5 Galaxy customers by Q3 next year. So maybe you’re not priced aggressively enough, I don’t know. But it’s not easy for me to evaluate Galaxy, and the 1-year lock at first further ensures it’s easy to postpone the $7200 decision a little longer, ensuring it will only be a hit with True Believers, of which I just don’t see enough yet, and I don’t see how this pricing will help me make any new Converts.
Dean
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It may not convert people over now, but when it successfully helps Meteor applications scale up and businesses buy into it, it can lead to more adoption through case studies from other larger companies.
@deanius, I really have to disagree with you here. Most of the DB providers now have links to most datacenters and you can pick that when setting up with places like Compose.
Galaxy is targeted at people with different scaling issues than startups. While I, and most others on this forum, are dealing with very typical scaling issues around Oplog write load issues, perhaps others aren’t at a much higher level? I only have one enterprise app customer and they are self-hosted for security issues, but they lack Oplog support and only have 1k users hitting the system. That is a much different load from the 200 constant concurrent users and nearly constant barrage of google bots I am trying to contend with on Crater.
We already know they have over 10 customers for launch due to a nice find by someone in the Meteor Club slack chat. I think MDG can double that in early days.
I also think it will be great to have MDG dealing with support issues that have plagued all of us for so long in devops long. Maybe we will start to see fixes trickle out in the form of 1.2.2 or some such?
In the long run, this will be better. Just maybe sucks to feel out in the cold (with pricing) for a short bit, right now.
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You can’t prove that and I would argue that it is untrue at this point. MDG has hosted very few large apps outside of Percolate and outside of the 10 they have on Galaxy. This will be a trial by fire and they will learn quick, but the first 10-20 customers will pay the price.
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as opposed to the price these customers would pay doing themselves?
Consider what it takes to scale a Meteor app. In the old app days, you just do a round-robin and maintain statelessness. With Meteor things change due to the constant connection. Now consider who is the best team to build a mechanism that can connect / reconnect clients on the fly. Then consider who is the best team to debug it when it goes wrong. Maybe you could use meteor-cluster if you fancy your chances, but I know where my I would bet my money and even if they still have some lessons to learn, I still think that the MDG are the best devops guys around for Meteor apps, unless you know someone better?
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We were accepted into the Galaxy early access program, and paid an invoice for 1 year at $495 monthly. We are not a well-funded startup. We’re bootstrapping it, but we’ve had Meteor applications in production for two-and-a-half years already. Today we’re running 5 production apps (hosted on Modulus and Heroku) and also we spin up staging and testing servos when needed.
A single servo on modulus.io costs around $30, but you want to run on at least 2 servos to reduce downtime. So with 4-5 apps running on two servos you are over $200 per month on Modulus.io. You could host on Galaxy for $495 and it would cost twice as much, but you’d also have spare containers to grow into. Also (we hope) there will be better support and less downtime than with Modulus.io. (We’ve wasted way too much dealing with Modulus.io downtime and performance issues.)
Personally I wish Modulus.io had been more on the ball regarding the Meteor opportunity. They had a Meteor hosting solution years before Galaxy, but I feel they dropped the ball as I wrote about elsewhere.
If you are an individual developer, just stay with MUP, Modulus.io or whatever you are using and wait for Galaxy Individual Developer Plans to be announced.
My biggest criticism of Galaxy is that 1) I wish pricing was more a la carte. I don’t want to pay for 10 containers at $500 if I only need one or two containers. 2) metrics only show me the last few minutes. I should be able to see larger periods of time. We’d also like to see more stats baked into Galaxy. It’s very basic. 3) logs are purged on re-deploy so we lose the history. Also it would be nice to have some tools for searching the logs.
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The price they would pay hosting with people that have experience.
Nginx and Haproxy can do this out of the box pretty easily without much effort. Network routing has been solved long ago by many other people. There is no real magic here. Places like Modulus have grown to the point where they have custom routers written in Go to deal with all the traffic they push. There is no doubt in my mind that Galaxy is using Haproxy to cover the bit you are talking about here.
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lower-end of a developer rate is around $75/hour
…where do you live? I don’t make $156k/yr 
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Having websocket load balancing using HAproxy is one thing, and it’s totally different to have a client connection jump to another container because the first container failed. All the current load balancing mechanisms I know for Meteor require sticky sessions because they can’t handle this case.
Luckily, I don’t have to worry my little head about these details because I would rather trust the MDG deal with this stuff in Galaxy whilst I eat macaroons. That was and remains to be my point!
San Francisco, of course!
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