Show HN: Node.js Hosting Platform with Integrated MongoDB

Show HN: Node.js Hosting Platform with Integrated MongoDB(modulus.io)

37 points by zwigby 13 years ago | 26 comments

old-gregg 13 years ago |

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!

zwigby 13 years ago | |

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.

christkv 13 years ago | | |

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.

Kudos 13 years ago |

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

cannadbt 13 years ago | |

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

dmauro 13 years ago |

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.

rartichoke 13 years ago |

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.

andypants 13 years ago |

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)

paulgb 13 years ago |

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?

zwigby 13 years ago | |

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).

JPKab 13 years ago | |

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.

zwigby 13 years ago | | |

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.

paulgb 13 years ago | | |

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.

xoail 13 years ago | | |

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.

davedx 13 years ago |

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.

latchkey 13 years ago |

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

cannadbt 13 years ago | |

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.

dccoolgai 13 years ago |

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

cannadbt 13 years ago | |

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.

austinrory 13 years ago |

Looks great guys. Much better than the alternatives.

nodesocket 13 years ago |

Awesome job guys. Best of luck from NodeSocket.

zwigby 13 years ago | |

Thanks for the support.

bradpineau 13 years ago |

Great idea. Will check it out.

outside1234 13 years ago |

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

cannadbt 13 years ago | |

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

* 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.