Introducing Meteor Cloud

Meteor Software
Meteor Blog
Published in
5 min readJan 20, 2021

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The only full-service cloud offering built specifically for Meteor apps

After months of hard work and feedback from customers and the incredible Meteor community, our team is excited to Introduce Meteor Cloud — the only full-service cloud offering built specifically for your Meteor app.

This is an exciting update for us, so let’s jump right into things. The release of Meteor Cloud is the evolution of our existing commercial offering. Put simply, we are unifying the product offering for Galaxy Hosting, APM, and Atmosphere into one home: Meteor Cloud. At the same time, we are adding some key features that have been requested for many years. We couldn’t be more thrilled.

Why Meteor Cloud?

Our team is constantly working to improve the Meteor experience, which led us to these changes. To understand how we got to Meteor Cloud, we have to go back to the current functionality.

Meteor Developer Accounts have always been separate from Galaxy Hosting. Users would create their Meteor Developer Accounts and host separately through Galaxy, not having a simple or cohesive dashboard for seeing what’s being used across applications. It worked, but we knew it could be better.

What’s included in Meteor Cloud

By unifying Galaxy Hosting, APM, and Atmosphere together, we’re building a space that encompasses everything you will need when building and hosting your Meteor applications. Everything is now accessed through one login portal. We’ve also aimed to create a user experience for all levels of developers. Whether you’re a new developer or a seasoned pro, Meteor Cloud is optimized for every skillset.

The biggest visual changes you’ll notice will be after login into your account. After you log in, you’ll now be brought to your Meteor Cloud dashboard, which is essentially a launchpad for Galaxy Hosting, APM, and Atmosphere. Since we’re simplifying the overall experience, we wanted to simplify the dashboard design and make everything flow cohesively together. Check it out below.

New Meteor Cloud Dashboard

What does this mean for you?

If you’re already a customer of Galaxy Hosting and have an app deployed, nothing changes! You will log in with your existing Meteor credentials and have all of the same features and functionality available to you, along with the new design upgrades and easier navigation across Regions, Organizations and Apps in the Meteor Cloud navigation:

New Meteor Cloud Nav Bar

The 3 Components of Meteor Cloud

Galaxy Hosting

Galaxy is the only hosting platform designed specifically for Meteor applications. Once you build your application, you can seamlessly deploy and host your Meteor app with Galaxy. Galaxy is the preferred hosting product for Meteor applications of every size, from hobby projects up to Fortune 500 companies. Galaxy continues to be the most efficient way for you to host and scale your Meteor application because it removes the need for expensive DevOps work. More than 2,000 companies rely on Galaxy to host their Meteor application.

APM

APM brings sophisticated application performance monitoring to Meteor applications. With APM conveniently located in your dashboard, you’ll have a window directly into your app’s performance. You’ll be able to see real-time metrics so you can monitor how your application is running and make any necessary fixes.

Atmosphere

Atmosphere is the central home of all open-source Meteor packages. Within Cloud, Atmosphere brings together the library of open source packages that make building a Meteor app more efficient and powerful. Each package is free for you to install and use in your Meteor app.

Additional Improvements in Cloud

The return of the Free Plan

One of the features we’re most eager to announce is the return of the free plan. This is something that was deprecated a few years back, but we’ve been itching to bring it back. This means that every Meteor Cloud account that is created will be free by default, with access to Atmosphere and a small (perfect for testing and hobby projects) Galaxy Hosting plan to make it easier to deploy a Meteor app. This is available today with Meteor 2.0 (stay tuned for a full announcement next week).

MongoDB Hosting

Meteor Cloud now also comes with a free shared MongoDB instance. Support for MongoDB out of the box has been requested by the community for quite some time and will make setting up a database for your application much simpler. This is a shared MongoDB instance across all applications in the same region, so we recommend swapping in your own MongoDB instance when you move to production, but this is a great solution for getting started quickly. MongoDB Hosting is available with Meteor 2.0.

GitHub Sign Up and Sign In

We’ve also added GitHub authentication button to the sign-up/sign-in flow. This will allow for simpler creation of Meteor Cloud accounts, quicker sign-ins and a better developer experience. This is our recommended account creation option (you can give it a try here).

Plan Updates

We’ve also updated our plan structure to be a bit simpler and easier to understand. You’ll see each plan of Meteor Cloud broken out on our pricing page. These plans range from Free all the way up to Enterprise and are built to support your needs as your application grows.

New plan options include Enterprise and Free

We’re thrilled to have such an incredible community around us, and we’re excited for you to check out Meteor Cloud and all it has to offer. If you have any questions or feedback, please do share in the Meteor Forum or reach out to us.

If you’re ready to dig in, click here to log into your account or sign up here.

Now, let’s get building!

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Meteor is an open-source platform for building top-quality web apps in a fraction of the time, whether you're an expert developer or just getting started.