Digital Ocean has a really interesting portfolio with stuff like MEAN and LEMP baked into a single instance, ready to go.

What makes you happy is pretty much always the answer. You need to get up every morning and be excited about what you do.

ConEmu is a great tool. It can take PuTTY to a new level, making it feel a lot better integrated with the desktop.

Data prisoning is a big deal. You need companies with clear paths to data migration. Something very important to ask when getting into a situation where a vendor holds your critical data.

I have heard good things about DreamHost. They seem like a good place to look.

For us we need special hosting that most of those cannot offer. So we look at hosts like Heroku, Elastic Beanstalk, Joyent and OpenShift.

We were considering Google Apps for Quixotic, but the team is small and everyone was already very used to Microsoft tools. So, at least for now, we went with Office 365 instead. But Google Apps was a strong contender. It's a great product.

Our Principle Engineer came from a strong Microsoft background so that played a big role, even though we are not focused on Microsoft development tools.

@MattSpeller said:

@QDesk said:

Who knows when we will have a demo of QDesk available, would be awesome to have someone testing us out when we are ready for a private release. Going to be completely free and completely hosted, so other than a nice web browser, no performance worries.

When you do I happen to know a forum full of cool people who'd likely be interested in it....

LOL. Thanks. Getting rapid feedback from potential users is exactly why we are looking to do our development "out in the open" here in the community! We hope to get lots of rapid feedback, ideas and testers

Who knows when we will have a demo of QDesk available, would be awesome to have someone testing us out when we are ready for a private release. Going to be completely free and completely hosted, so other than a nice web browser, no performance worries.

I'm building a small MongoDB server there so that I can follow along with the MongoDB training that I am doing on PluralSight.

Very sad.

It is rather unlikely that we will be able to consider a self-hosting option. The nature of SaaS application development does not lend itself to self installation. It would require rather an extensive bit of experience to get working and would still require a whole packaging infrastructure to support.

Nothing public to show yet, maybe as some progress is made Andy's team can post some screenshots of what is coming.

Nearly the weekend!! Can't wait, it has been a very busy week here at QS.

Amazing how much performance you can get from these "last gen" servers. The Intel world has gotten incredibly powerful and cheap.

Good news on neutrality, I mean, not that Cuban is able to make public commentary.

Good news, it would seem.

@Aaron-Studer said:

Theses link aren't helping:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/15/hosting_outfit_nodeki_breaks_lifetime_promise/

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=278412

http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/08/17/1734250/joyent-drops-lifetime-account-holders

l think that it is important to not judge one vendor by the bad behavior of others. There will always be badly behaving vendors who pull a fast one, cheat you, steal your data or what have you. But you can't assume that everyone will do that or you would be unable to do business. If we looked at it that way, we would assume that because AMC went belly up that all car companies are going to go out of business and we would stop buying new cars because we are assuming that warranties are worthless because we are not evaluating the existing car companies based on their own merits but evaluating them based on the failure of an unrelated company.

Nice article, handy information. Thank you.

I am getting up to speed on MongoDB because it looks like we are going to likely be using it extensively on some of our products so I want to be as familiar with it as possible before I have to work with it all of the time. I am watching PluralSight's "Introduction to MongoDB" videos.

Thanks everyone!