A while back I installed ServerPilot which automatically sets up Nginx/Apache/PHP/MySQL for you. It also handles security updates. This made those $5 VPS' so much more appealing [1] as I could install lots of small Node.js apps on a single server, and avoid managed hosting providers who seem to prefer charging per app instance.
Anyway ServerPilot then scrapped their free plan so I've been looking for an alternative. cloudron looks cool, I don't see anything specific to Node.js/Express, but it does have a LAMP stack which includes Apache, so I might try that. Otherwise I'll probably use something like CapRover [2], a self-hosted platform as a service.
Would love to get your opinion as I'm building a competing product to ServerPilot in this space. Is the $5 too expensive for the service? or is it just too expensive because the billing increases as you have more servers under management, and they charge you per app as well?
Are there features ServerPilot is missing that would justify the price more for you? Some examples might be monitoring, analytics, automated security patching, containerization of workloads, etc.
Would the plan be more appealing if the cost of the plan, the portal, and the VM hosting itself were all rolled into one? (i.e. you would just pay one company, rather than having to sign up for DO as well as ServerPilot).
1) Independence of hosting provider is a must. Don't want to be forced to use your VPS service when I have all my infrastructure already on Linode, DO, Vultr, etc.
2) Should be free when used in non-commercial applications. Multiple servers included.
3) Keep the common and already available typical configurations free: lamp, lemp, python, letsencrypt, email. Charge for things which no other panel free or otherwise typically supports. lightspeed, go, caddy, load balancing, sql replication, graphql, etc. Thats value.
Anyway ServerPilot then scrapped their free plan so I've been looking for an alternative. cloudron looks cool, I don't see anything specific to Node.js/Express, but it does have a LAMP stack which includes Apache, so I might try that. Otherwise I'll probably use something like CapRover [2], a self-hosted platform as a service.
[1] https://twitter.com/umaar/status/1256155563748139009
[2] https://caprover.com/