Nodester - Open-source Heroku-style hosting for node.js
nodester.com
nodester.com
"Our database was compromised and all of our data was maliciously deleted. (We are still working with our CouchDB provider to restore this data and help with forensics to hand over to the FBI.)"
Not a good start.
Node & couch together are a pretty nice combo though, it's just JSON & JavaScript all the way. There is no context switching between programming languages like what is typical using Ruby or whatever for your application layer.
Been shoveling lots of ice & snow in my spare time instead :(
[0]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2116319
[1]: http://nodejitsu.com
I explain my assumptions so you can better answer my question; as I say, I am assuming there's a positive answer, I just don't know what it is.
The main downside of something like heroku is that if you want to do something that would require custom config on a VPS (e.g., installing some oddball software package), you can't. There are also restrictions on what directories you can write to, and so forth, and some fairly common gems require workarounds to deal with them. But enough people find it a net win that they've had, I believe, the largest YC exit to date.
[1] Walkthrough here: http://docs.heroku.com/quickstart
You need to set the thing up in the first place. You need to secure it. You need to configure monitoring. When something breaks, you need to know how to fix it.
Virtual servers don't help that much - at least you don't have to build the thing with your own hands, but the sysadmin angle is pretty much the same.
It's a ton of very specialised knowledge which a great deal of web application developers don't have - and if they do have it, they may still not feel confident being the person on call.
There's a good reason the Heroku guys earned $200 million for making that set of problems go away.