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Ask HN: Should I Use Heroku, Digital Ocean or Modulus.io for MEAN Stack?

by yatoomy on 3/11/15, 8:22 PM with 5 comments

Recently given 3 servos from Modulus (equiv to dynos on Heroku) and began wondering if I should move my operation. Heroku has been good, and has yet to cost me serious $$. Its dead simple to use and the "revert" button has saved my a$$ more than I can count. However, Modulus specializes in node/mongo, and the servos are a nice touch.

I also have a credit from Digital Ocean, but it seems you can use that storage with Modulus? Not 100% sure

  • by joshstrange on 3/11/15, 8:45 PM

    I'm partial to DO/AWS because I see both Heroku and Modulus as Golden handcuffs [0]. If you like Heroku/Modulus then I would look into things like Dokku/Dokku-alt, Deis, Flynn, etc. All of them support buildpacks so you can probably get your application running and once you have it running on any of those platforms you can run it on any cloud infrastructure that you want and you can even switch clouds fairly easily (spin up new nodes in new cloud, move old nodes out of load balancer).

    All of that said I get the appeal of Heroku/Modulus and you might be just fine staying with them until traffic/users require more dynos/servos then looking for alternatives. I can't really suggest moving off H/M without knowing more about your product and how you will need to scale it.

    [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_handcuffs

  • by atmosx on 3/11/15, 10:22 PM

    Is this for a commercial service? If yes, then I'd say at the beginning go with Heroku (or Modulus), concentrate on software and leave the DevOps/Sys-admin for later. If your project starts generating enough cash/traffic then either stay with Heroku (if this is a 1-guy venture) or go with a VPS if you have time or can find someone who will setup and manage all the rest (security, updates, backups, etc.).

  • by bbcbasic on 3/12/15, 3:27 AM

    Depends on you / your team, how is your Linux admin skills, security and performance tuning knowledge? I would personally prefer to throw a bit more money at Heroku and not have the hassles.

  • by camhenlin on 3/11/15, 9:47 PM

    I use digital ocean. Anecdotally, they are friendly and their service is convenient and easy to use