Web Apps is the name of our managed application platform technology. It consists of a supervisor daemon responsible for starting, monitoring, and re-starting your processes, a command-line tool to control the daemon, and a web interface to manage all services.

The Web Apps platform comes with the latest stable version of Node.js pre-installed and configured. You can use it for Node.js applications out of the box. However, it can also be used to run many other environments as well, for example Ruby on Rails, Django, etc.

Node.js is a JavaScript runtime environment based on Google Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine. It makes it possible for applications written in JavaScript to run on the hosting server.

A runtime environment provides an application with access to all resources it needs in order to operate. For example, Node.js provides JavaScript applications on the server with access to the server resources (file system, RAM, CPU, etc.).

The Web Apps platform is not limited to running only Node.js applications. You can also run Ruby on Rails applications on it, for example, as well as other applications that require a runtime environment.

Yes, you can. The Web Apps platform is an extension of our standard hosting infrastructure. The managed web server (Apache), multiple PHP versions, and MySQL server required for PHP applications are all available on the Web Apps platform. In fact, you can run any application that is suitable for our shared hosting setup on your Web Apps account as well.

You can use the local file system for data storage or the managed MySQL instance on the server. You can also run MongoDB and Redis instances for data object storage using the Web Apps platform.