Hosting in different set-ups than LAMP (Node.JS, Ruby, Backbone.JS etc) are becoming fairly popular so today we are going to talk about it to our users. We will present you many options that you can choose one as your default hosting, and we will enlist the pro’s and cons of each.
I myself have bought a general hosting space that supports Ruby and Node.JS applications because clients started asking for these technologies too often (not that i am complaining about, Node.JS is fun to play with). And as in every part of the capitalism, demand means production, so lets get it!
Update: I forgot to mention that these kind of systems are called “Cloud Application Platforms”, services that host and make it possible for their users to fastly deploy web applications.
1 – Heroku
Their slogan pretty much explains for us what they are trying to do with their services:
Build apps, not infrastructure.
Heroku provides you with all the tools you need to iterate quickly, and adopt the right technologies for your project. Build modern, maintainable apps and instantly extend them with functionality from hundreds of cloud services providers without worrying about infrastructure.
Heroku is a “Cloud Application Platform” for you, or your developers to be able to deploy skeletons for and build web applications written in Ruby. You can deploy applications on it via GIT or their own HTML5 uploading window.
A review from one of the users:
I’ve been working with Heroku for client projects full-time for over 7 months now and I don’t regret it.
The obvious pros:
– Not having to worry about managing your infrastructure;
– Ease of scale by moving your Dynos slider up;
– Easy integration with 3rd party services such as SendGrid, MongoDB, Redis etc…;
– Savings – most sites don’t need maximum horse power all the time so you can achieve massive savings by using a PaaS like Heroku – pay for what you use. Some businesses fit here quite nicely;
Now the main cons:
– You’re completely bound to their – Heroku/EC2 – service health. They go down, you go down. It’s that simple. Amazon had a major outage this year and brought several famous websites down with it.
So three pros and a con. Fair enough. But let’s now move to the other most popular one:
2 – Amazon EC2
From their own website:
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios.
It is the same as Heroku, except they are safer.
Thanks for the read and see you on the next one!