Chapter 12. Deploying Node applications and maintaining uptime
This chapter covers
- Choosing where to host your Node application
- Deploying a typical application
- Maintaining uptime and maximizing performance
Developing a web application is one thing, but putting it into production is another. For every web platform, there are tips and tricks that increase stability and maximize performance, and Node is no different.
When you’re faced with deploying a web application, you’ll find yourself considering where to host it. You’ll want to consider how to monitor your application and keep it running. You may also wonder what you can do to make it as fast as possible. In this chapter, you’ll get an overview of how to address these concerns for your Node web application.
To start, let’s look at where you might choose to host your application.
Most web application developers are familiar with PHP-based applications. When an Apache server with PHP support gets an HTTP request, it’ll map the path portion of the requested URL to a specific file, and PHP will execute the contents of the file. This functionality makes it easy to deploy PHP applications: you upload PHP files to a certain location of the filesystem, and they become accessible via web browsers. In addition to being easy to deploy, PHP applications can also be hosted cheaply, because servers are often shared between a number of users.