Yea, I got tired of waiting for Heroku and Joyent invitations so I created NodeFu and open sourced it so that others could have fun too! The repo is at http://github.com/chrismatthieu/nodefu

Fantastic! Are there any real differences between the current node.js cloud platforms (nodefu, no.de, nodeJsCloud, Heroku's service etc...) from an architectural point of view?

Hi, so we wanted to chime in a bit. We are building our node.js hosting platform (nodeJSCloud) on our own hardware, in a data center. Going this route vs using 3rd party hardware EC2 or Rackspace, gives us complete flexibility to do some nifty things. We are going to e-mail out a newsletter shortly with additional details.

For one Joyents no.de platform runs on their "accelerators" which are basically Solaris containers and there is a different package management system to deal with than you may be used to (they use pkgsrc) but it's pretty easy to figure out. Mostly you will just be using node package manager (npm) for node packages.

Thanks for this, I couldn't find the link to github easily. Please put it in a slightly more prominent place, so people get what you mean by "open source node hosting platform". Great job!

Heroku does have experimental Node support if anyone is interested:

http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2010/9/20/an_update_on_herok...

And Joyent's Node service is pretty good too:

https://no.de/

On the same line of thought, we're working on http://www.erbix.com which provides Server-side JavaScript hosting (and a browser-based code editor) using the open-source Rhino engine.

To help SSJS in getting main-stream adoption, we've coded some apps, Erbix Forms and Erbix Blog, written completely in JS, which we've open sourced and launched in the Erbix App Store ( https://secure.erbix.com/marketplace ).

If you have any feedback let us know.

Duostack has also a nodejs setup.

I have been working on a small game and so far I am very happy with how it works.

http://www.duostack.com

My company Nodejitsu (http://nodejitsu.com) also provides a node.js Cloud Platform-as-a-Service.

I'm the author of forever and node-http-proxy and it's good to see our production quality node.js software being used by other people :-)

There's also http://webbynode.com/

They have ready-made stacks with Node.js, Rails and Django.

Joyent employs ryah. They've been around for 6 years, although I'm not sure how long they've been doing server-side JS (at least since they bought Reasonably Smart at the start of 2009).

I would definitely be inclined to go with the Joyent service since that's where Ryan Dahl (creator of node) works. And Heroku pretty much rules this realm.

But competitors are good!!

And http://www.akshell.com/

Just to add to the list, there's also nodeJsCloud: http://www.nodejscloud.com/

Thanks to everyone providing the links to all these services. I knew of some of them, but not others. Thanks!

To complete the list: http://apps.jgate.de It is based on AppJet and CouchDB.

If its free, who is footing the EC2 bill?

Which gives me the idea: it'd be cool to have a service like this and have it use a user-provided AWS account.

So you could use a service like this to automatically manage the EC2 instances, and then if you need to take control to expand your instances' functionality you just stop using the service.

Just a thought...

Great idea! I took notes on the installation of NodeFu on EC2. I would like to include them in the bootstrap readme in the repo so others can easily standup their own instances too.

so you need EC2 to use NodeFu? Not a dealbreaker, but I didn't get that from the splash page.

You can deploy it to your own instance of EC2 or Rackspace or GoGrid or you can run your apps directly on the http://NodeFu.com hosted platform.

gotcha! the hosted platform is killer! When I want to take the dive into node, I'll be sure to try this out!

Logo and company name seems very similar to http://www.nodejitsu.com It's also curious NodeFu seem to be using some of Nodejitsu's open-source offerings to make this work. ( https://github.com/nodejitsu/node-http-proxy and https://github.com/indexzero/forever ).

Are NodeFu and Nodejitsu the same company?

NodeFu is not a company but rather an open source project. It does use the http-proxy module - https://github.com/nodejitsu/node-http-proxy

I'm even more confused now. Is NodeFu the open-source offering for Nodejitsu?

If NodeFu isn't a company, how can it be the "heroku for node.js".

I am founder of Nodejitsu. Nodejitsu and Nodefu are not related in anyway, although based on reading these comments it looks like NodeFu does use open source software we wrote, which is great to see

http://github.com/nodejitsu http://github.com/indexzero

Node to win :-D

Am I missing something here? Because Nodejitsu's logo is a bonsai tree and NodeFu's is a ninja ...

New blog post just released: NodeFu - Free Hosting of Your Node.JS Apps In The Cloud! http://t.co/iHIuTtb < It's a step-by-step example for deploying a @Tropo node.js communications application on NodeFu!

NodeFu has just surpassed 150 hosted node.js applications since the launch on yesterday - http://nodefu.com/status

Also, you really might want to add some read permissions to your CouchDB on CouchOne. Currently all nodefu global config data is world readable.

Thanks! CouchDB is now secured.

Has anything of significance actually been developed on Node yet? Seems like there is a lot of excitement about it (like the early Rails days), but I haven't seen any sites announcing they're written in it.

ReadWriteWeb had a piece on that topic today: http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/01/how-3-companies-are...

That pointed over to this longer piece about how Yammer, Proxlet and Bocoup are using Node.js: http://bostinnovation.com/2011/01/15/who-is-using-node-js-an...

We're using it at Loggly for our HTTP inputs.

It looks like this story made it to Mashable! http://twitter.com/#!/chrismatthieu/status/27435153945010176

New NodeFu blog post (Node.js Coming of Age) spotted at http://www.voiceingov.org/blog/?p=2228

It looks like @NodeFu has a new corporate sponsor! Thanks Tropo (http://tropo.com)!

I like the fu scheme. Great idea. Sensei, are you still giving out coupons?

The site is down for me. /edit: It's now reachable again. Thanks.

The site had an out-of-memory error probably from all of the Mashable traffic. It's only been online for 2 days and needs more tuning. Thanks everyone!

This proves, there is a lot of demand for such a solution and you had an idea, that people like a lot. Congrats.

There is a huuuge demand for ssjs but hard core coders don't want to accept JS is a great programming language for the whole web stack, including mobile apps.

Looks great! Thanks for open sourcing it so others can learn from what's involved in creating these type of services

I like the name... nothing wrong with it.

And congrats for the initiative !

Learning some Ruby now but next step is Node.js, then I will try it out.

Are there any information about the length of the waiting list for coupons?

We are planning to release the next batch of 50 coupons on Friday! Stay tuned...

And.. it's an "under construction" PPC link page already. 2 days!?

Love your ninja

Why the name?

Because the domain and twitter handles were available. Other name choices like Nodester and Nodeku were not available on Twitter.

That is cool, because NodeFu sounds much better than either of those names. It is a pretty cool name.