When will Meteor.com Meteor hosting be reliable enough for production use?

Question

I've had very mixed experiences trying to host on Meteor.com.

I often get "This site is down. Try again later.". Initially I couldn't figure out why, but then I suspected that the problems were caused by me accidentally restoring the "system.users" collection. I tried restoring without that, but the site went down a few days later. Today, it's magically back up again without me doing anything.

"meteor logs" shows nothing. It's a complete black box.

I've investigated other options (Heroku, demeteorizer, meteor bundle, etc), but they are clunky and unreliable too (problems installing fibers, doesn't seem to handle Meteor.call() properly, etc).

I would really like to host in production on Meteor.com, but I feel I can't trust it right now. Free is nice, but I need reliable, production-quality Meteor hosting. When will I be able to buy that from Meteor.com?

Thanks, Graeme

Answer 1

From the documentation:

We provide this as a free service so you can try Meteor. It is also helpful for quickly putting up internal betas, demos, and so on.

So it means it's intended to try things out, not for production. They offer it for free, I think it would be bad manner to abuse it. And with so many people around trying the thing, don't be surprised if it's overloaded from time to time.

I'm not sure if and when the Meteor team will make this hosting production ready. At this moment, I'm happy they're focusing on making the framework mature.

 

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For other options, Heroku works as a charm. I'm using it for several projects, including production ones, and had no problem. Don't bother with demeteorizer and such. Just create a new app and run these commands (replacing appname with your app name):

heroku git:remote -a appname

heroku config:add ROOT_URL=appname.herokuapp.com

heroku config:set BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/oortcloud/heroku-buildpack-meteorite.git

git push -f heroku master