I am trying to evaluate whether Meteor JS would be suitable for a future project that would incorporate live chat, and may need to be scalable.
It certainly can perform the chat functions, but I don't want to paint myself into a corner if traffic spikes and we need to provision the app with more resources in the form of drones/dynos/instances. I have read that a Meteor app on Heroku won't easily scale (perhaps not at all?). I am not clear on whether this is a Heroku issue, or more to do with the current state of Meteor JS (0.6.2.1 at this time). I've not found much more related to Nodejitsu or AppFog.
Can anyone clarify whether a Meteor JS app can currently be deployed on a PaaS such that resources (drones/dynos/instances) can be easily scaled up to meet demand? If so, which Paas? If not, what is the explanation (for a 5-year-old), and is there a roadmap?
Personally I've set myself up with an AWS load balancer and EC2 instances, with my DB over at MongoHQ.
The load balancer setup was made that much easier by following these instructions:
http://www.ripariandata.com/blog/creating-an-aws-elastic-load-balancer
I wrote a script to deploy to a single EC2 instance. It wouldn't be much work to add additional remotes in case you have multiple instances: