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Comment by creativename | Hacker News Reader

As someone just getting into Node.js development, I had been looking into a good (free, for now) PaaS for a hobby project. I had settled on Heroku, and I like it so far for its simplicity. However, reading this was the first time I had considered OpenShift for Node.js. Can anyone comment on the merits of OpenShift vs. Heroku? I've found surprisingly little information comparing the two while searching around.

From what I was seeing, OpenShift looked like it may offer more capacity with its free plan, but I may be missing something here...

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Comparing the free Web Dyno on Heroku vs free Cartridge on OpenShift, the latter starts up faster for me. On the other hand, the client tools for OpenShift are of slightly lesser quality. And one more thing, with OpenShift you get Node.js 0.6 while with Heroku you can specify the engine version.

Can't believe no one recommended http://nodejitsu.com. I use them exclusively right now.

There's also http://nodester.com but I've had to move away from them due to too many problems.

Have a look into NodeJitsu http://nodejitsu.com/

They recently opened up their services to the public and still have a free tier.

Not sure if that is a factor, but being in the UK I got way too many 404s in the free tier. In comparison (the same app), Heroku or OpenShift work like a charm.

Thanks for the info (I'm in the UK as well).

Our current approach is to create our own machines with dedicated & VMs we rent cheap and setup ourselves. Always interested in recipes to do that.

Nevertheless we are currently evaluating managed solutions like joyent, nodejitsu or Redhat's Openshift to take away the extra workload in managing the iron.

AppFog just expanded their free tier to be able to use 2GB memory and 50GB of transfer.

Wow, looks very impressive. Thanks!

I may actually just start with that. From what I can tell, you get a much much larger database than Heroku, but with a lower bandwidth cap (although 50GB vs 2TB for my purposes is indistinguishable). AppFog also claims it has the "Fastest servers available on any infrastructure" (for what it's worth).

Unless I'm missing something, it sounds like a much better deal. Then again, I'm talking about two free services, but it would be nice to be able to avoid upgrading to paid for as long as possible.

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