Looks like the Google App Engine team has just announced support for Node.js. I’m glad to see GAE expanding their offering. I tried GAE for a PHP app back when they started supporting PHP and it worked pretty well. The pricing wasn’t great for side-projects, but I’ve heard that has gotten better lately. And while I wouldn’t launch a mission-critical Node app on GAE right now, it’s nice to know their are other options besides AWS. But I will also caution people to GAE, there was a lot of mixed feedback from the crowd over at Hacker News – some raving about GAE and other having horrible experiences. As always, YMMV, so make sure to do your research and test out the different platforms before you go all-in.
And since I mentioned side projects, I’ll definitely make a plug for Digital Ocean and Dokku. For $5 you can create a droplet with 512 MB, 20 GB SSD and 1000 GB transfer which is more than enough for multiple side projects. Since DO supports Dokku images, it’s super easy to spin up a droplet and start deploying apps to your droplet. If you’ve used Heroku, it’s that easy to deploy to Dokku.