Question

I’m interested in hosting nodejs applications in a cloud and I’m looking for a free cloud hosting for my purpose. I’ve found that Amazon has one but I have the following question: Are there any tutorials around how I can set up and run nodejs application in Amazon EC2?

EDIT: Can you provide any good hostings for nodejs (except heroku)?

Answer 1

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