Javascript is a popular and powerful language for building on the web. These days, it’s safe to say the majority of web apps and websites use Javascript on the front end in some capacity. However, Javascript – specifically Node.js – is also an excellent choice for back-end and server-side functions.
Node’s runtime environment is non-blocking and event-driven, which allows it to perform tasks “in the background” making it an excellent choice for real-time applications. Web apps typically require a lot of network requests to be made. Blocking other operations while those requests are complete would slow down the entire application. Node’s asynchronous callback architecture allows new requests to be processed even while other requests are still pending.
This makes Node.js high-performance, and scalable. It is also compatible with most other web-building tools and has the largest package ecosystem of any software registry. It is used by millions of developers (around 1.4% of websites worldwide use it), so answers to common questions are easy to find.
In this article, we’ll look at the best web hosting platforms for your Node.js app so that you can get the best performance from your Javascript applications.
Best Node.js Hosting Platforms for 2023
We evaluated these Node.js hosting platforms across a range of criteria, including feature set, pricing, compatibility, ease of use, customer support, free trial availability, and customer reviews.
Let’s dive in!
1. DigitalOcean – Best Overall
Digital Ocean is well known for web hosting among web developers. They offer multiple solutions for hosting Node.js applications, including Droplets (VMs), platform as a service, and one-click configurable solutions that take all the effort out of your hands.
Their documentation is excellent and easy to find, and because they are used by so many devs, there is a vibrant online community readily available to answer any questions you might have. They have a robust product suite and transparent, reasonable pricing.
Pros
- Excellent documentation, guides, easy-to-use APIs, CLI, and user interface
- Recognized and trusted name
- Specific guides on how to build and deploy Node.js applications using their tools
Cons
- Customer support sometimes has very long response times
Customer Reviews
“Unlike other Cloud Platforms, which also have a large marketplace; involving many enterprise applications, DigitalOean focus more on the latest technology software that a normal user would experiment with or use in production.”
“DigitalOcean has data centers in specific regions, which may limit the options for deploying infrastructure in certain geographic locations.”
“The user interface by far, is the standout item to me. This is because there is never really a question of whether something does the thing you want or is the thing you are looking for.”
Pricing and Usage Limits
Digital Ocean’s basic pricing for its Droplets is $4/month to start. This can run any level of workload, from a low-traffic site to a flagship web app. For a managed Kubernetes setup, you’ll pay more: about $12/month. Other add-ons like fully managed databases and object storage are also available.
Best for: Overall Node.js Hosting
2. Kamatera – Best for Price
Kamatera offers high-performance cloud hosting at a reasonable price. Their flexible, low-cost cloud servers provide any level of computing power, and adding on cloud block storage is very easy and cheap at just $0.05 per GB.
Selecting the Node.js option allows you to choose data centers in the US, Europe, China, and the Middle East. They offer pay-as-you-go pricing that makes it extremely easy to start small and scale up quickly.
Pros
- Low-cost: plans start at just $4/month
- Support is extremely easy to find and readily available for all users
- Managed hosting takes all the maintenance out of your hands
Cons
- Developer community is small, so answers to FAQs may not be easy to find online
Customer Reviews
“I was first of all impressed by the breadth (and speed) of their electronic scope – at least triple redundancy. That was a major point that was capped by their 24/7 service capability. That was further enhanced by the professionalism of their staff, Oren and his associates. I normally do not write glowing enhancements but, in this case, I do not hesitate to do so unreservedly. I have been recommending Kamatera (and Oren) since we started dealing with them.”
“Overall good but add invoices for god’s sake. The servers are nice and the IP i got wasn’t in any spam databases. Pricing is great, but I seemingly can’t delete my bank card details. Also, they don’t create invoices, so everything is billed automatically every month. It sucks since many people (including me) need more control over billing and every other hosting has that lacking feature.”
“Easy to use. Quick setups. Great uptime. Awesome technical support. I highly recommend them.”
Pricing and Usage Limits
Kamatera offers a handy price calculator on their website that can be used to estimate costs for your specific use case. Their basic cloud server pricing starts at $0.005/hour, which works out to around $4/month.
Best for: price
Amazon’s Simple Website Hosting solution is a powerful option for those looking to deploy Javascript-heavy, rich web apps that rely on Node. AWS is known for being highly scalable and for having an incredibly flexible pricing model. Their offer VPS (Virtual Private Server) solutions, as well as shared hosting.
AWS also has extensive documentation on how to deploy Node.js applications to their servers using AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Amazon Dynamo DB. Their online guides and resources for developers are some of the best in the world.
Pros
- Shared hosting solutions offer low-cost ways to deploy your app
- Tutorials and resources make getting started easy
- Pay for only what you need
Cons
- Customer support is not dedicated or easy to find
- Pricing not transparent or easy to estimate
Customer Reviews
“Amazon Web services is the most robust and user-friendly public cloud platform that helps us to run our infrastructure and the business application seamlessly. We have been using this cloud platform for almost four years and never turned back after that.”
“I had a pretty average experience with AWS maybe because many of the functions I cannot perform alone and always need a second person to help me out.“
“Amazon Web Services is a simple, robust, agile and easy-to-use cloud infrastructure platform. We have been using this to streamline and run our web platforms and the products and features this cloud platform is offering is amazing.”
Pricing and Usage Limits
AWS’s pricing starts with a generous 12-month free tier that can get you started doing almost everything you need to do with the platform. From there, pricing is flexible, offering pay-as-you-go options, discounts when you commit to long-term service, and volume-based discounts for bundling multiple services.
Their pricing is not transparent or easy to find online, but they do offer a pricing calculator to help you estimate costs.
Best for: shared hosting
4. Microsoft Azure – Best for VS Code Users
Azure is Microsoft’s cloud-based hosting platform, and it offers dedicated solutions for Node.js projects. One of the coolest things about Azure is its integration with VS Code (a Microsoft IDE) which allows you to deploy Node.js apps directly from VS Code.
Azure allows you to run full-stack apps on their dedicated Linux servers, in serverless functions, or in Docker or Kubernetes containers. You can add additional services like Postgres and MySQL databases, and Continuous Integration tooling.
Pros
- Seamless integration with VS Code
- Easy to add additional features that Node.js apps commonly use
- Excellent documentation
Cons
- Costly
- The platform can feel overwhelming for beginners
Customer Reviews
“Our experience with Microsoft was good! All the services that they provided us enabled our company to build, deploy and manage applications and services with ease.”
“If you are new to cloud computing you will be overwhelmed with this solution. Just navigating the platform, you will find different services and options that will necessarily require training and specific documentation.”
“Microsoft Azure is a great public cloud platform. At my organization, we have been using this cloud platform to run our all applications and infrastructure. I must admit this is a robust and easy-to-use cloud platform. I like the security and compliance of this platform which is best in this segment.”
Pricing and Usage Limits
Azure’s pricing is pay-as-you-go, with options to earn discounts when you commit to long-term plans. They have generous free tiers that include access to Linux and Ubuntu VMs, Azure functions, and the Cosmos DB. Their pricing is not easy to parse online and use of their pricing calculator may be needed to determine your specific costs.
Best for: VS Code users
5. A2 Hosting – Best for Easy Setup
A2 Hosting is best known for its WordPress hosting solutions, however, it offers lots of other web hosting options, including hosting for Node.js applications. Their dedicated Node servers are high-performance, developer-friendly, and offer excellent security. They also do free site transfers to their platform.
Their most popular offering is the Turbo Boost solution, which offers turbo servers that deliver 20x more power than a standard Node server. Their user interface is managed by CPanel, which could be a plus or a minus depending on your previous experience with CPanel.
Pros
- Recognized and trusted name in web hosting
- Security conscious
- Free site transfers
Cons
- CPanel
Customer Reviews
“The service provider is very reliable. Ever since l started using A2 hosting, l haven’t encountered any challenges. They give timely updates on subscriptions and updates. My application is always up and running.”
“I purchased a managed server based on the assurance that my website would be both secure and speedy. Unfortunately, this proved to be untrue. My WordPress website stopped functioning properly, specifically with regards to the cron jobs, which in turn prevented the automatic updates of all plugins. This led to my website being infected with malware.”
“Their migration team did an excellent job and my first support request was resolved by their first response. I definitely recommend putting in a ticket over the support chat.”
Pricing and Usage Limits
A2 Hosting’s pricing options start at $5.99/month for their basic Drive option, which allows unlimited websites, unlimited SSD storage, unlimited backups, and free migration. Their Turbo Boost offering is $6.99/month and offers all of the above, with turbo servers that claim to be 20x faster than the Drive servers.
Best for: easy setup
6. Heroku – Best for Beginners
Heroku is an incredibly popular solution among devs who want to spin up an app very quickly and for free. It’s excellent for testing in-development apps and doing trials of products. Their production-level Node web hosting solutions are also excellent.
Heroku can have you up and running with an app in minutes, and from there you can start to scale, paying for only what you need. Their VMs (called Dynos) are easily manageable through a clean and intuitive user interface, and their Github, MongoDB, Postgres, and Redis integrations allow you to extend your modular architecture nearly infinitely.
Pros
- Easy to get started, highly scalable
- Reasonably priced
- Vibrant and engaged developer community
Cons
- Since being taken over by Salesforce, customer support may be lacking
Customer Reviews
“We’re using Heroku Platform to quickly ship our web applications to our customer. Heroku Platform made it very easy for us to do an initial launch of our application quickly and fairly cheaply to start with.”
“Heroku is becoming an average platform with poor support [in my opinion]. Since the acquisition, [I feel] Heroku has put aside engineering quality. Additionally, the support people, [not] only they are not helpful, [I believe] they actually are giving completely [inaccurate] and dangerous advice.”
“It enables us to deploy quickly and simply. Heroku enables us to get multiple services with almost zero DevOps overhead.”
Pricing and Usage Limits
Heroku offers a free plan and an online pricing estimator to help you figure out the cost of your unique needs.
Best for: beginners
Side-by-Side Comparison
| Provider | Free plan or trial | Node-specific documentation | Strong support community | Best for | Basic Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Kamatera | X | Price | $0.005/hour | ||
Digital Ocean | X | X | X | Overall | $4/month |
AWS | X | X | X | Shared hosting | Use price calculator |
Azure | X | X | VS Code users | Use price calculator | |
A2 Hosting | X | X | Easy setup | $5.99/month or $6.99 for Turbo | |
Heroku | X | X | X | Beginners | Use price calculator |
FAQs
What should I look for in a Node.js hosting service?
You want high scalability, flexibility, and performance in your Node VPS hosting platform. VPS plans should include a basic plan with a guaranteed base level of performance, with the ability to scale up through pay-as-you-go frameworks. Options for added-on features like caching, Postgres, and MySQL databases are also nice as your product grows.
How important is server speed and uptime in Node.js hosting?
Server speed is critical for Node.js hosting providers. Node apps typically manage real-time transactions like chat streams, push notifications, and other time-sensitive operations, so uptime and server speed is key.
What distinguishes the top Node.js hosting providers from others?
The top Node.js hosting providers offer Node-specific guides and documentation, have vibrant developer communities available to answer questions, and have outstanding customer support. Additionally, many hosting companies have global data centers that make network traffic lightning-fast, and many offer free Node.js hosting options for beginners or early-stage apps.
How does customer support play a role in choosing a Node.js hosting provider?
Customer support will depend on your level of comfort with Node.js applications. If you have a dev team that is willing to take on some DevOps work, and who are familiar with Node, customer support may not be such a high priority for you. If, however, you have minimal experience with Node, you may consider customer support a driving factor in your decision-making.
Experienced software engineers and avid supporters of the developer community, specializing in APIs.
