Recommendation on NodeJS managed hosting?
First ever question on IH. Looking for suggestion to host my nodeJS application. Development on EC2 but thinking of using 'Elastic Beanstalk' to deploy nodeJS part.
Debating between EBS vs production EC2. Would like to hear what you guys are using to host NodeJS.
Regards
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If you truly do need a Node.js server and are developing something go with the path of least resistance first.
I am working with DigitalOcean Apps with my Node server and love it. CI/CD connected to github out of the box, predictable pricing. You can also easily hookup a cheap managed database to the app. You can always refine on either of those 2 later on, but the pros and cons will sort themselves out as you are developing on the easier solution.
I have also heard good things about AppRunner as a backend as a service and allows for rollback on commits
TL;DR: Don't over engineer your MVP
Thank you Avid for your input. This is what I've in my mind and you confirmed it.
I'd recommend looking into Heroku as well. It's more expensive than something like EC2 or DigitalOcean but it can save you a lot of time and effort in reduced devops over the long run.
I would totally go with Heroku. I've tried them all and Heroku just gets the experience right. I wouldn't worry too much about scale. I've consistently found dramatically overestimate the number of servers they'll need. Usually a simple autoscaling approach means you could get to tens of thousands of users spending like $50 a month.
If feasible, I've also found that using Next.js in combination with Vercel works incredibly seamlessly and you only pay for what you need.
Choose render.com or heroku. ec2 and other similar solutions will eat up a lot of your time in server admininistration. Of course, if you are constrained to use amazon, you can setup something like dokku on a ec2 instance. Not sure about elastic beanstalk though.
You can get better suggestions by telling us more about your application and company. Are you a single developer? What kind of load do you expect?
I (mostly) stay away from cloud services, because I want my bill to be predictable and manageable (for myself, not startups I work for). I am with Digital Ocean now, and self host everything with a single server. DO has managed databases and S3-like object storage as well, so I can easily switch to them at any time.
Learning how to deploy and run things yourself (be it DO or EC2) will also help you to understand and debug your application, even if you switch to full managed solution down the road.
I don't have experience with AWS Elastic Beanstalk, only Heroku. Heroku would be very easy to start with, although it's on the more expensive side. I like both DO and Heroku admins, I cannot stand the one from AWS :).
Go for Lambda functions. It might require you to refactor your code but the benefits in terms of scaling and cost are a no-brainer.
Not only will it require you to rewrite your code, it will also lock you in to a proprietary platform, and make you have to pay for development, testing and staging cycles as well as production. A real win, win. /s
Use a self-built, single digital ocean droplet running ubuntu at $5/month.
Hosting NodeJS is easy, I would personally recommend getting a cheap VPS and having the app there, there is not a lot to manage, you can have a VPS running for years without any issues, as long as your app doesn't crash (which also applies for managed cloud platforms). You can use pm2 to run and monitor your Node app.
You can check & compare all hosting for nodejs here:
https://comparewebservices.com/vps-hosting-for-node+js
Hope it helps.
It really depends on what the app does, which libs it uses, what APIs it connects to, etc..
I used EC2 years ago, then switched to a simple DigitalOcean droplet with an nginx reverse proxy in front of it. But now my whole stack has changed and I'm using Firebase Functions or Vercel or Cloudflare Workers (just testing it out) and honestly it's the best dev experience in years.
+1 for Heroku. They basically automatically run a Node.js Git repo for you. It can be as cheap as $7 for an always on instance. It does get pricy though, especially if you use their Postgres solution.
There are some things like Heroku that are cheaper like render.com, but I haven't really played with them.
Hi,
Please give a try to https://flashdrive.io
We offer a developers tier completely free and we'd love to help if you need us. We wanted to create FlashDrive to offer a concrete, reliable alternative to Heroku for app hosting.
I use nodechef.com…scalable and great support in my experience.
Lean20 used to use EC2, but I recently switched it to ECS. I was going to use Beanstalk, but ECS was cheaper.
It's late, and I don't have time to get into it now, but I'll set a reminder to edit this tomorrow.
Like I said, we were strictly on EC2 instances, and were using PM2 to manage the node services. It worked fine, but I auto-scaling was difficult. In part, it had to do with the size were were using (T3-micros), and the CPU credits assigned to them.
When we had load on the system a new server would come online, but it had no credits available to actually do anything. By the time enough were built up, the load would be gone and we basically wasted the money.
Switching to a ECS cluster allows us to get more value-per-dollar out of a server.