hosting nodejs application in EC2

I've been using Node.js with Amazon EC2 for a while and was quite happy with both of them. For the moment AWS seems to be the cheapest and the most robust cloud provider, so picking up Amazon wouldn't be a mistake. There's nothing special about running Node.js in the cloud - you work with it like if it were your own PC. Below are some general steps to follow for the simplest Node.js application running on EC2 Ubuntu server:

1. Create Amazon EC2 account.

2. From AWS console start t1.micro instance with any Ubuntu AMI (example).

3. Login via SSH to your instance.

4. Install node.js: sudo apt-get install nodejs

5. Create new file test_server.js with the following content:

   require("http").createServer(function(request, response){
     response.writeHeader(200, {"Content-Type": "text/plain"});  
     response.write("Hello World!");  
     response.end();
   }).listen(8080);
   

6. Start the server: node test_server.js

7. Check it's working from another console: curl http://localhost:8080

Check out these tutorials

1. Node.js with nowjs using an AMI on ec2
2. Installation from scratch - the complete guide
3. Nodejs server with Express.js and socket.io on ec2

My blog post on how to deploy Node-based apps on EC2: http://devblog.daniel.gs/2014/01/deploying-node-apps-on-aws-ec2-with.html

Explaining:

• Deploying Node apps from your github repo (private+public)
• Automating the deployment process using scripts
• Reverse proxy using Nginx
• and using Forever utility.

Hope this helps.

There are quite some hosting solutions for Node.js available, here are a couple of these:

Joyent

Joyent is the corporate sponsor and trademark owner of Node.js and provides an appealing alternative to Amazon EC2 for many things, not the least Node.js hosting of course, see the Joyent's Node.js Development Environment (please check the Node.js™ Development SmartMachine Terms of Service though).

Apparently they are just restructuring this development offering though:

For the past year, Joyent Cloud has provided a free development sandbox for users of Node.js. Over time, the community has made it clear that they want more tools and more capacity. To this end, we are excited to announce a partnership with Nodejitsu to provide both of these in a world-class Node.js development environment with Nodejitsu's development and management tools running on Joyent Cloud's Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform. The new service will launch very shortly.

Accordingly, it is not entirely clear yet how the pricing options for a production hosting of a Node.js solution will end up, but given Joyent's competitive pricing, I'd expect a similar option at least.

Cloud Foundry

The Cloud Foundry Open Platform as a Service Project support Node.js as well, amongst many other frameworks (which makes the platform so exciting), The platform is getting quite some traction recently and is meanwhile used by several solution Platform as a service (PaaS) providers as their backend accordingly - amongst these are (in no particular order and not necessarily complete):

• AppFog - Simple PaaS for Java, Node, .Net, Ruby, PHP, MySQL, Mongo, PostgreSQL, and more... Freedom to move between IaaS at will with the easiest pricing in the cloud.
• Cloud Foundry (VMware) (corporate sponsor of Cloud Foundry) - Deploy and scale applications in seconds, without locking yourself into a single cloud.
• Iron Foundry - Iron Foundry is an open source project that extends Cloud Foundry™ to the .NET ecosystem by providing services, installers, and developer tools.

Most of these are in beta still and the pricing isn't settled yet, but given the competition I'd expect quite some interesting options here over time.

The easiest way to run node.js for free on EC2 is IMHO on Heroku.

check out this complete tutorial here. This tutorial shows how to install Node.js on EC2 and configure HTTP ports and nginx for port forwarding as well as using supervisor to run the Node.js forever as it normally stops on closing your SSH console session.

I just went through the Heroku sign-up and application tutorial. Could not have been easier. What a delightful experience...

...right up to the point where you can't have a MongoDB instance as a free gear. The minimum cost (other than a free trial month) is $18/month per GB of storage.

Honestly, the better choice then is Openshift. It's got three free gears which is enough for a lot of beginner stuff like what I'm doing. Both Heroku and Openshift are within Amazon's space but their customer interface is different. I thought Heroku's was easier for beginners to get started but as I mentioned, there's no free lunch on the database side of things.