Show HN: Node.js Hosting Platform with Integrated MongoDB | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Node.js Hosting Platform with Integrated MongoDB

modulus.io

37 pointszwigby26 comments

Hey guys, congrats on launching. (this is the launch right?) As others said, your design/appearance is awesome and the pricing calculator is superb.

Some feedback:

  * Seems like you're on AWS. I would like that to be disclosed: 
    when picking hosting these things matter, wouldn't you agree?
  * Secondly, you don't seem to be protecting yourself from abuse: by charging 
    for docs you're on the hook of someone storing a ton of large
    documents - think GridFS.

Anyway, congrats again!

Yes we're mostly on AWS. We actually use AWS for most of the infrastructure and then Azure for hold stats we push. This will be added to FAQ, ASAP. I agree that is does matter.

GridFS stores chucks as different documents so this still should be fine for our pricing scheme. Each chunk is saved in 256K document.

Thanks for the comment.

Be careful :) The node driver lets the developer set the chunkSize which can be up to max BSON document size (16MB at the moment). So you might want to keep that in mind.

Yeah great point.

Typo in the marketing copy, "seemless" should be "seamless".

See what happens when developers write copy. We'll get that fixed. Thanks!

Great job on the presentation. It's immediately more impressive than your competitors. I'm looking forward to hearing some feedback from people that try it out.

What's with the pricing for the DB being based on the # of documents you have stored. Really feels like you're trying to nickel and dime your customers.

Looks great!

I'd love to see more technical details about the specs of servos, specs of mongodb instances, info about replica sets and sharding, etc.

Pretty exciting, as you are to my knowledge only the second sevice that provides seamlessly scaling mongodb databases (after dotcloud). (By seamlessly scaling I mean, I don't have to upgrade my plan and migrate data)

This looks promising. I wanted to go with Heroku for a node project a while back and couldn't because their feature-set didn't meet my needs (not to mention that your pricing is more affordable). A couple questions:

1. can your load balancer handle raw TCP load balancing, or is it always HTTP aware?

2. does it work with wildcard subdomains?

1. We do not currently do raw TCP load balancing. It's HTTP and WebSocket load balancing. It's not an impossibility to do. Just haven't had a ton of people ask for it yet.

2. Yes you can use wildcard subdomains. You can then use different subdomains or wildcard on any project(s).

Just curious, but why do people on HN seem to prefer Heroku for Node projects? Is there a feature that I'm unaware of?

I'm a Nodejitsu user (and yes, its not free, so I get that) but Heroku doesn't even support Websockets at my last check.

People use what they're used to so most of the time that falls back to Heroku. I get that, I really do. Just want to make sure people know it's not the only option.

It was in fall of last year that I was looking at options and I don't think Nodejitsu was available on paid plans to the public at that time. In any case I don't think they supported the raw TCP routing I needed at the time.

We use heroku at carddrop simply because it fits our requirements and we are comfortable with it. So far we haven't had any issues other than dynos idling (when we were on free account). We do serve quite decent traffic.

This is a fantastic alternative to Heroku for node hosting. I particularly like the focus on those three features: app servers, data storage, file storage.

Very compelling, I'll keep it in mind if I do any new node projects.

The servo's estimator only slides up to 10. Does this imply that this is only intended for smaller customers?

We're definitely targeting small to medium customers. I think PAAS has the biggest payoff for teams that size. We have a customer on the platform now using dozens of servos, so it does work for big apps as well.

Is there a free try-it-out thing like node.jit.su has?

We went with a free credit approach. Everyone gets enough credits for over a month of free service. The credits also let you evaluate the service however you want, you can spend them on anything.

Looks great guys. Much better than the alternatives.

Awesome job guys. Best of luck from NodeSocket.

Thanks for the support.

Great idea. Will check it out.

looks interesting - what cloud platform are you based on behind the scenes?

Amazon runs our infrastructure and customer apps. Stats are all fired over to Azure. This is something we need to add to the FAQ.

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