I have recently conducted a poll on Twitter to get and idea about the features people expect from an ideal platform for hosting web applications written in node.js. I asked only one question: “What features do you expect from a platform for hosting node.js web applications?”. This was followed by a list of 19 features I was interested in researching; for each feature people could choose one of four answers: “I don’t care”, “Weak advantage”, “Strong advantage”, and “Would not use a platform without it”. This post presents the results at the time 243 responses were gathered.

The overall ranking

I ranked the features by assigning the scores as follows: for every “I don’t care” answer a feature was given 0 points, for every “Weak advantage” 1 point, for “Stong advantage” 2 points, and finally for “Would not use a platform without it” 3 points. The rank value represents the sum of points from all responses for a given feature:

The deal breakers

Below are the features for which more than 20% of respondents answered “Would not use a platform without it”:

The underdogs

Below are the features for which more than 20% of respondents answered “I don’t care”:

What do you think?

What do you think of this data? Is there a feature that was not on the list but you care deeply about? Do you expect different features from production and development environment?