Node.js Application Hosting Service running on Digital Ocean

One of the Stackful.io devs here.

I'm all for server tweaking and I do it all the time, but sometimes it gets boring. I could probably do something better than configure php5-fpm for the thousandth time.

Right now, Stackful.io takes the pain from that when it comes to Node.js development. You just pick a server size and hit a button. 2 minutes later your machine is ready to rock and you can deploy your app with a simple Git push.

We are planning on doing the same for the other major web technologies. We have some pretty good progress with a Python stack and a PHP one is in our queue.

I'm amazed something that works like stackful.io or heroku for your own servers has not been written yet. Like you, many tinkerers have a cheap server to use as a lab. It would be great if one could install on it some piece of software that provided heroku-like zero-friction deploy for new apps. Just do "app create", push a git repo and, bam, the app is deployed, with sensible defaults. The defaults are not supposed to make everyone happy, but, like a default heroku deployment, to allow you to start new apps with zero friction, thus encouraging experimentation and hacking.

Regarding cuisine vs. Chef Solo... I think it mostly depends on what your scripts do. In my opinion, Fabric/Cuisine make it absurdly easy to execute commands against a remote server and most of the time that's enough for a decent deployment. Chef's execution API is, to put it mildly, clumsy. I cringe every time I have to type something like:

execute "#{virtualenv_dir}/bin/pip install -r #{requirements_file}" do user deploy_user group deploy_user end

IMO Chef shines when you have to move a lot of config files and generate node- and role-specific configs. I feel it's a lot simpler to just have recipe-specific files and templates packaged with the recipe and move them over with commands like cookbook_file and template.

Right now we are using both the technologies. Our stacks are Chef-based since we want people to be comfortable with reading (and possibly modifying) its code. We also reuse a lot of the Opscode recipes which simply do not exist for Fabric/Cuisine. Fabric and Cuisine have their place when we bootstrap a server and prepare the Chef environment and at several odd places where they keep things running together.

Gray - send me an email -> mitch [at] digitalocean

I will take care of it for you.

Digital Ocean have been great so far, support and problem solving experience are amazing. Hopefully your problem will get fixed quickly.

Great post, btw.

Unfortunately, there is a problem with DO Amsterdam location.

"The 512MB and 1GB sizes are currently not available in the Amsterdam region due to RIPE IPv4 restrictions and limited availability of IP space."

Thank you!

Feedback and feature requests are welcome.

Thank you so much! Good luck with Commando.io!

Our team is located in Europe.

Unfortunately, the problem with freemium is that at the end paying customers have to sponsor the free accounts.

And in most cases providers do as much as possible to lock you in, so you don't switch to a cheaper option when you reach certain size.

On the other hand, we want customers to know that they can leave us whenever they need to. Your apps are completely portable, so there is no reason not to give it a try.

You can launch your sever and deploy your app for free. You can keep the server alive later if you need to.

Prices start from $8/mo for 512 ram SSD server.

Thanks! Yes, we will definitely support Rails soon (several weeks). We are working hard to make all major stacks available.

Most of the backend and frontend is written in Python and we are working on a Python stack. Stay tuned!

Fixed. Thanks!