Deploying an app to a server environment

Virtual Private Servers (VPS), Dedicated Servers, or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), for example, the likes of Amazon EC2 or Rackspace and owning our own server machines all have one thing in common: they have total control over the server environment.

However, with great power comes great responsibility, and there are a few challenges we need to be aware of. This recipe will demonstrate how to overcome these challenges as we safely initialize a Node web app on port 80.

Getting ready

We will, of course, need a remote server environment (or our own setup). It's important to research the best package for our needs.

Dedicated Servers can be expensive. The hardware to software ratio is 1:1; we're literally renting a machine.

VPS can be cheaper since they share the resources of a single machine (or cluster), so we're only renting out the resources it takes to host an instance of an operating system. However, if we begin to use resources beyond those assigned...