Migrating from Amazon EC2 to Nodejitsu PaaS

Last year I decided to renew my website, and cause I was also studying Node.js I decided to develop from scratch the publishing platform—you can read more about it in here—and self host it on Amazon EC2 to get a grip on the platform.

As my first attempt to self manage a server, setting up the EC2 instance was far from an easy task for me. It took me a couple of days of studying official documentation and tutorials to successfully setup the EC2 instance, deploy Gestalt via GIT and have the server run it as a demon.

During this time, while Gestalt grown in capabilities and performance, I discovered myself to be a terrible SisAdmin. Therefor when I received the notification that my free tier was about to expire I quickly decided to migrate everything to a managed platform where my only concern would bee to work on the Gestalt.

Looking for the perfect match for my needs I decided to give a try at Nodejitsu’s Platform as a Service (Paas)—being attracted from their convenient fees, with the cheapest plan, for individuals, starting at $3 a month. Prepared for a long and painful migration I created an account studied their documentation, installed jitsu CLI via npm and in less then 10 minutes Gestalt was running smoothly from their servers. Once I’ve been sure that everything was stable I update the DNS records and shutted down the EC2 instance.

It’s early for me to comment on their service reliability, but with such a pleasant startup I can not help but recommend their service.

During this time (from February 28 2012) I’ve been able to use their services for free leveraging the Free Tier Period