Meteor Galaxy, a cloud platform for Meteor applications | Hacker News Reader

Meteor Galaxy, a cloud platform for Meteor applications

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168 pointsthousandx41 comments

This is a bummer for me. My meteor apps are large enough to not want to host on free `meteor deploy`, but small enough to not warrant a $500/month plan.

Where's the $40/month plan? The $100/month?

Also the fact that it doesn't come with the database is off putting. I was under the impression all these months that Galaxy would be a one-stop-shop for Meteor hosting.

Bummer, total bummer. I hope they come out with more middle ground pricing.

Bummer here as well. And thanks for the tip about not including a database. I'm surprised they didn't mention that in the article! Seems misleading. Since the original free deploy does include the database and they didn't mention it not being included in the article I simply assumed it was included in Galaxy.

It barely matters. Compose.io's mongo db service is also in aws east. It's simply a matter of pasting the mongo connection url they provide. The scalability they provide would be a waste of MDG's resources to build themselves. Perhaps they could automatically integrate with compose.io, but other than that its identical to what MDG could ever provide.

So unless ur bummed about costs again (i.e. the Compose.io costs on top of Galaxy's costs), U pretty much have everything u need now. It seems soon they will provide a cheaper account.

+1 also MMS does all this for you. https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/

It says "Subscriptions for individuals are coming soon." on the pricing site.

https://www.meteor.com/why-meteor/pricing

For a cheap hosted option you can setup a Digital Ocean droplet at $10/month and use Meteor Up (https://github.com/arunoda/meteor-up/tree/mupx) for your deployments. This will include the database as well.

That link is to Meteor Up X(development version) which uses Docker just like Galaxy. Once it's stable it'll be merged into Meteor Up. I've been using it for prod/staging pushes and it works great even with SSL.

Scalingo (a Heroku-like) can host your meteor app http://doc.scalingo.com/languages/javascript/nodejs/meteor/

It looks like they are purposefully ceding the small-fry market to Modulus[1] and maybe even Digital Ocean[2]. Part of what you're buying here is access to the Meteor team and best practices at scale. From what I've heard that's something it's harder to get from Modulus.

[1] - https://modulus.io/

[2] - https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-depl...

edit: spelling

Agreed. Just FYI, you probably mean "ceding the small-fry market" (i.e. concede).

Derp...I do. Typing to fast. Thanks.

Yep, this should be the top comment. The disappointment others have voiced about a lack of indie price tiers is understandable, but it all makes sense if you look at this as preemptively attacking the top end of the market. It's an ambitious play - if they fail to attract enough big clients they're going to have to go down-market into something more crowded, but if they succeed, they have the opportunity to create a powerful feedback loop between Meteor's profile and Galaxy's success.

if you're going to mention these, you should also mention scalingo. For setting up Meteor, they're my go to, because oplog tailing is set up by default.

Yep https://scalingo.com/meteorjs-hosting

That's a great point I didn't think of. If so, it seems a little odd -- I would assume, as someone who's toyed with Meteor but not dived in (in part, waiting to see it mature and what hosting with the canonical experts costs), that they'd realize they can capture some of the bottom end just fine. I'm surely not the only developer who falls into that category/potential market.

With the mention of Individual plans coming soon, I'm sure they are after that, too. I think it's more that they didn't make the offering clear, nor make it more obvious that these plans aren't the full shebang.

Based on the press release, I was expecting a Heroku like full stack service. Was surprised to learn you need to setup the DB from FAQ.

> Does Galaxy include a database?

> Galaxy does not provide the database layer. You can run your own MongoDB server inside AWS, or create a database through any number of MongoDB hosting providers.

https://www.meteor.com/why-meteor/galaxy-faq

Yes, I agree. I was expecting something to just work and provide everything

I can't decide what to think about this pricing. Would a company pay $6k a year to almost not worry about hosting / ops? Actually, yeah, probably. Still seems like it's missing a lower tier though.

Pricing page says that subscriptions for individuals is coming soon.

Yeah, I'm so used to the pricing tiers used by Digital Ocean, Amazon, and Google Apps that I'm looking at this and going "Wait, the $995 a month tier isn't for enterprise?"

Everyone else is almost in a sort of pricing war, so it really feels very much against the current.

FTA: "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"

"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."

So yeah, little specs plans are coming too.

The difference is, Meteor won't have the volume of Digital Ocean or AWS, so they can't run on low margins. They need a high-margin pricing model in order to survive. The danger here is that high-margin pricing provides a high incentive for the largest customers to move to AWS, so they'll have to be sure to provide enough value to keep the big folks.

I think the difference in number of users is partly due to the asking price. I wouldn't use DO if they charged 50$ a month for a VPS to use for mocking up apps. For my use case, 5$-10$ a month is the most I want to pay in such early stages of development.

500$ a month is cheap when you have revenues. But when bootstrapping an app, it's simply out of the question.

On a slightly unrelated note:

Would it be possible to make a webapp like Meteor in Clojure pretty easily, using CSP go-style channels ang go-threads.

I imagine a function would "broadcast" or "listen to" websocket connections. If the app uses channels for communicating between different go-blocks, server/client contact could use an identical interface. Sending things server-side would be no different than sending things client-side.

Could also be a simple 2-function library.

Huh. You'd need a closurescript wrapper around MiniMongo which is the in memory mongo database that powers Meteor's isomorphic code. But in theory very doable.

Yep. In Coils it has a frontend database cache like MiniMongo

Sente is a good library that allows you to do something like this: https://github.com/ptaoussanis/sente

You would have to do the database code yourself, however.

Yes, it's definitely possible, I've personally done that many times and we do that at my current company as well. It ends up being a few hundred lines of code, and you have pretty much full understanding of what's going on and you can fit the code to your needs.

Also this: https://github.com/zubairq/coils

You missed out on calling this meteor belt.

It works only in the AWS us-east cloud, what about Eu?

This. So many clients refuse to host their data in the US because of the gov't .

Curious - are AWS's EU clusters subject to EU laws, or US ones? I would've thought that as a US corporation, they'd be subject to both. If the US government has a warrant to snoop on Amazon's customers, it doesn't seem like Amazon has much choice (as a US corporation) but to comply.

Unclear, but our EU customer was satisfied by using the EU servers.

Currently the US-of-A believes that US laws _always_ apply, no matter where. However that doesn't jive well with EU privacy laws. For example the easiest way to comply with the German privacy laws ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesdatenschutzgesetz ) is to host inside of Germany itself (See also: AWS eu-central-1).

Microsoft has been busily fighting this notion ( http://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2015/04/09/our-lega... ) for a while now. Basically all the tech companies are waiting to find out what happens ( http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/08/us/politics/apple-and-othe... ) because it means the difference between "US Law applies everywhere" and "US companies can comply with foreign data protection laws". Unfortunately these two things are mutually exclusive.

404 @ https://www.meteor.com/why-meter/pricing from the article

it seems to work now

Looks like a link typo in the article. Here is the right link: https://www.meteor.com/why-meteor/pricing

I want to learn more about Galaxy's security hygiene. I also want to learn more about what reasonable steps Galaxy is taking right now to ensure our data is safe after we `meteor deploy`.

Are they compliant with any security accountability programs like FEDRAMP/FISMA, ISO 27002, PCI-DSS and HIPAA?

You might be interested in seeing the efforts on `clinical track`: https://clinical.meteor.com/ for HIPAA

Why on earth is it so expensive? Is meteor so resource hungry?

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