Hosting of Application in Europe

i found some entrys to my question, but they are old or not specific enough. Got the following question and please keep in mind that my administration skills for servers suck hard :)

I want to host a node.js app which connects to a mongo database. I want this app to be highly scalable (easy) in number of instances, server space and so on(performance).

First Question: Would you recommend a managed server or a cloud solution? 

Second Question: I think cloud solution are more scalable on the actual situation. So which provider would you choose? I'm currently on Heroku, but want to switch to Amazon Web Services. AppFog also sounds very interesting. 20$ for 8 instances but low traffic volume.

I appreciate every help you can give and excuse my bad english.

Did you try Jelastic cloud solutions? There a lot of hosting providers in Europe http://docs.jelastic.com/jelastic-hoster-info
I would recommend either ElastX as they outperform any other, or LayerShift as they provide excellent support.

We get asked this sort of wide open question a lot on the #node.js IRC channel. Honestly it very much depends on your experience and capabilities.

There's a massive range of services to consider, from simple no-devops-required systems like Heroku ranging up to installing your own hardware in datacenters. The problem with answering it is that it really does depend on the requirements and the experience of the person/company implementing it.

It's very rare for VERY large scale systems to end up implementing on cloud services (the only major exception I can think of is Netflix). But that shouldn't put off most people because the needs of Facebook and Google and other large scale places aren't required by everyone else.

99% of the time a cloud solution is fine. Whether you choose PaaS (Heroku style) or cloud servers (Linode or Digital Ocean style) depends on your devops experience - Heroku is more expensive but requires less skill. Choose what you have the skill to pay for and implement easily.

I don't recommend switching from Heroku to AWS though. I personally find AWS to be very crowded and performance just isn't there. Consider another provider instead, unless you really need the AWS APIs that allow very quick scaling up under peak loads (like Netflix does).

Get dedicated server on e.g. Hetzner (see http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver ) they provide cheap an excellent service, and you can add additional disk when you need it.

Doesn't heroku runs on AWS? Last time I checked.

The other benefit that cloud solution gives you is instant power. If you expect a lot of traffic on a single period then you can deploy more server and remove it afterward. 

We tried jelastic (via dogado/hosteurope).  for node.js you'll get the virtual server there and thatsit (last time i checked)

Look at the DigitalOcean VPS service. I use it and it's really awesome. It's better then Hetzner