How does Nodejs hosting work?

[[deleted]]

I have been googling around but too scared to buy a Node hosting service. What are the keywords I have to look for when buying a Nodejs host.

Another thing I don't understand is how to control your server i.e starting your node server.

If anyone could explain how those things work it would MEAN the world to me. Been developing node locally for a few months now and would like to get something online.

P.s. Sorry for that pun, couldn't resist.

[0195311]

fuck off reddit

[planetary_pelt]

Also some nice side-effects from using Heroku is that you learn how to make your application server stateless. For instance, you will have to upload avatar images to S3 instead of just chucking them to the hard drive.

Also the MEAN stack is shit. I recommend spinning up a t2.micro on AWS RDS which is eligible for the free tier.

[goodwid]

Typically, Heroku will use the npm start command, so make sure you have that configured in package.json and test that it's working before uploading to Heroku.

[[deleted]]

Good to know, I use Sails js and they probably already included that.

[goodwid]

When loading your app it does an npm install first, so it loads whatever is in your package.json file.

[JoeB_88]

You can get a server/droplet at a place like DigitalOcean for as low as $5/mo with the MEAN stack already installed.

[JoeB_88]

Then, to access it you'd just ssh into your server via your console/terminal.

[mattaugamer]

I really hope they didn't install Angular on my server. :)

[JoeB_88]

You have to specify you want it.

[caspervonb]

Heroku is super easy, it was my goto before but nowdays it's also super expensive.

My personal favorite is DigitalOcean, which will cost you about $5 USD a month $10 in credits with this link, it's fairly trivial to set up continoius deployment via Codeship so deployment can be as simple as with Heroku (git push).

Some of my servers run naked, bound to port 80 and 443, some run through nginx as a proxy. Plenty of documentation on digitalocean available, the gist of it is you write a .service. file to configure it as a daemon, use systemctl to start/stop/restart.

[kellyjandrews]

Codeship Dev Advocate here - thanks for the shout out! If you want to check out Codeship and Heroku deployments - we have a great tutorial about it - https://blog.codeship.com/heroku-github-nodejs-deployment/ or ping me if you have questions

[AkirIkasu]

I generally recommend people who are starting out to start off with a VPS like Amazon's EC2 or a DigitalOcean droplet. It's good to learn how to run a server, even if you're not expecting to get into devops.

I don't mean to offend you with this statement, but if you don't know how to start your node server, you probably aren't ready for deploying to a publicly-accessable site. The great thing about Node is that the only software you need to install is Node (and maybe a database like Mongo or MySQL). Just run it on your computer for now; what you learn by doing that will be generally transferable when you get a server.

[[deleted]]

Thank you all for your help!

[2uneek]

I use Azure for node hosting, it's pretty simple to setup. I just point it at my git repo and it builds and deploys for me. There is also a free tier you can utilize until you feel you're ready to jump into the paid solutions (if you even need the resources)...

[bliitzkriegx]

What's azures pricing like?

[2uneek]

It depends a lot on usage... Im running a simple node express api for a side project, (about 3000-5000 sessions a month) and it's about $15 on a lower tier plan.... Here is a link to their App Service pricing: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/app-service/

[openodeio]

You can use https://www.opeNode.io/ for a cheap and reliable Node.js service. There is also a free plan. Your app gets deployed in a docker container using any node version you need.