Leaving NodeJS after years of learning and writting projects - Back to PHP

[Leandro Azevedo]

After years of learning and writting projects in NodeJS, I've just loved it. It is powerfull, portable and fit all my needs as a developer.

However, after looking up the internet for hosting a NodeJS application, I stumble upon a big problem that seems to be global.

All major web hosting services I've tried do not support NodeJS natively in their regular plans/packages.

To run a NodeJS server I'd have to hire a VPS service which costs at least 10x more than regular PHP hosting.

No matter how good NodeJS is. If it costs 10x more to be hosted online then it is time to move back to PHP.

That is very sad. So long NodeJS. Back to the 90s.

[Hafeez Syed]

use vpsdime, I am with them for the last 5 years and just paying $7/month.

[Gokce Yalcin]

If hosting requirements are not coming from your clients, then I'd recommend you to modernize your infrastructure (ie. with containers) before going back; this would enable you to utilize many other tech stacks, not just node or php.

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[Zlatko]

Hi Leandro,

Thanks for posting. I believe this is a valuable feedback - and to a point, possibly a valid concern that you're describing.

Small agencies and one-man teams have used the internet by providing the code which the client then hosts on a shared service and it's online, no matter where you pick it. The venerous LAMP stack was the go-to solution and still drives a huge part of the web. It would not be unreasonable to look for similar with a new platform, praised to be the new killer-app, allegedly so much better than PHP - but you can't even deploy it on a shared hosting service.

However, I'd like to point out a few things that you may have missed, or haven't thought about. Or if you have, but have different conclusions than I do - please point them out as I'd like to know if I have flaws in my logic.

Anyway, let's assume a few different aspects.

Aspect one - costs. You say that you have a major problem with cost prices, with cheap node being 10x more expensive than PHP. 

I'd say that on average, cheap shared hosts offer something in the range of 1$ (give or take) for a shared host ,shared database or few, up to 10-100 MB or similar. The cheapest you can get away with for a Node app is free. If your app is stateless, if your traffic is so low that a cheap 1$ shared PHP host is good enough for you, you can likely fit all your requests in the free alotments of the more popular serverless/cloud providers. Even the database providers, e.g. MongoDB which is what MySQL would be in a LAMP stack, you have free offerings until a certain size - usually more than accomodating enough for low traffic websites.

So I think it's a wrong assumption - hosting a node app can be affordable without "expensive" VPS services.

But let's say your app is a bit more demanding, and you really need a VPS service. The cheapest reliable VPS providers that I know of, Scaleway and Hetzner, provide good and stable VPS nodes for a Node app for less then 2.5$ a month (2€). DigitalOcean, as a much more "famous" solution, or Linode or similar, cost 5$. Which is really, really affordable and reliable. Such a VPS can hold both a node app and a good database server, such as MySQL, without issues. If you want redundancy, you could have two and have replicated server.

So, a VPS service itself is not that expensive.

But the biggest problem here is the domain. What do you use PHP for, what do you use a Node app for? PHP is usually just a CMS, with maybe a contacts form or a comment box or similar. As soon as it gets used more seriously, you can't rely on shared hosting, and you have to go VPS route anyway.

And Node, while it can also do that - in which case a serverless version is more than enough and will go a long long way before you need to start actually paying for some small monthly fee.

So how do you use Node? What kind of projects you need to host? What are your strategies for it? What are your hosting strategies for PHP for the same projects?

If you wanna make a comparison, you'd need to compare much more about how you approach your work.

Otherwise, it really is back to the nineties, with all the nineties horror stories with it.

Zlatko

[Eric Muyser]

Hosted for free and served to thousands: https://github.com/hyperbridge/hyperbridge.org https://github.com/hyperbridge/blockhub.gg 

Loaded from Google Sheets: https://blockhub.gg/#/updates (this site runs entirely free)

On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 2:21 PM Eric Muyser <eric....@gmail.com> wrote:

There's some logic problems with this.

#1 - if you've actually got traffic, the performance bang for you buck of a $6 VPS will outweigh the PHP hosting, request for request.

#2 - If you don't have traffic, you can host it free on Heroku. You can also deploy multiple apps behind a proxy on a single $8 heroku dyno.

#3 - Google and Amazon offer free tier/trial boxes.

#4 - PHP + LAMP stack isn't nearly as bad is it was. It's improved a lot since even 2010. Switching back to PHP + Laravel isn't such a big deal.

#5 - What do you need a node server for? Serverless or generated files (using something like NUXT) satisfies a lot of use cases. I host many sites on Github for free, generated with NUXT. If you need dynamic actions and database then it should be an API, and going back to the per request cost and performance, no way does PHP hosting outperform it.  For the database, I believe you can get one on Heroku free, or on lowest dyno. You can even use Google Sheets as a database, technically, if you don't care about edge servers.

#6 - Use caching, so nothing is going to cost 10x more or you're doing something wrong. Cloudflare even does it for free.

Hope this gives you some ideas.

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Eric Muyser

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Eric Muyser

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