I’ve recently wanted to do some work with nodejs and see what the ecosystem is like. Of course, NodeJS is quite controversial and recent in it’s creation, and has both fanatical supporters and fanatical critics (like anything else worth looking at) — and I have yet to get real experience with it, so I am trying it out.

As is always the case, the stack is a little bit complicated (not a simple NODEJS server, since that’s been done better than I could probably do it, w/ the Express package):

html/css/js- (+Angular?)

express

nginx

postgres

While the app is intensely simple in it’s function — I believe it’s something that could be useful, and it will certainly serve as good practice for me, working with nodejs and deploying a webapp that isn’t being run on Apache.

This is a chance for me to test many new technologies that I haven’t dabbled enough with before (outside of the usual screencasts/tutorials) — and it’s pretty exciting.

The real story here, however, is the superbly priced VPS offering that INIZ has. For under 10 pounds a month, they offer MORE speed and space than digital ocean and linode, and provisioning/management is a snap!

Of course, the support might not be as fast/great as digital ocean or linode, but for users who generally don’t interact with support, it’s perfect (using Hostgator, I barely interact with support if not to ask what I can and cannot do to the shared account that I am using, which is not a problem with a VPS)

Of course, I’m also using Bootstrap 3 which has just recently launched, and am enjoying the flat design cues (I was convinced that the flat design was only something they were trying out while it was a WIP, pleasantly surprised that it stuck around) — Building beautiful sites has never been so easy.