First Look at mLab and Atlas for MongoDB Hosting
While learning full-stack coding with MongoDB, Express, React Native and Node.js, I needed to find a good hosted service for MongoDB. I’m not interested in administering it on my own, and AWS hosts variety of other NoSQL and SQL databases but does not support MongoDB. So I looked at the two of the most popular solutions out there: mLab & MongoDB’s Atlas. Here is a quick comparison of my on boarding and setup experience.
mLab
This service has been around since 2011 and you can see how mature it is. The sign up process is very quick and easy to use. The UI design is nice and provides simple options and guidance to the steps I needed to setup and connect to my free trial instance. It’s very usable by folks like me with little or no experience administering MongoDB themselves.
After I finished configuring, it was setup and available to use immediately. My free sandbox is a single database on a shared instance with 0.5 GB of storage and no redundancy.
When Googling for MongoDB hosting, I found that mLab has great reviews for their customer support should I ever need it in the future. For a shared replica set which I could use in production, I would need to pay $15/GB per month with a 1 GB minimum. This is a very reasonable cost for not having to deploy and manage MongoDB on AWS. When my app needs to store more than 1GB of data, that means it will be successful and I’ll be happy to pay more to store more data!
Atlas
This service is hosted and run by MongoDB itself. It requires more information than mLab when users sign up, including company, cellphone number and job position information. It’s also positioned more towards B2B rather than B2D customers.
The sandbox configuration process provided me with many configuration options which would be useful to experienced MongoDB users setting up production clusters. However, most of them weren’t needed for my simple use case so I found the initial setup process to be longer and more confusing than mLab’s.
Deployment of the database took 7–10 minutes since it appears Atlas was actually deploying a three-node replica set for me on AWS. This configuration provides fail over redundancy and 0.5 GB of storage. It would allow me to use this as a small, reliable production database without having to pay anything.
Next Steps
As I develop my app and use MongoDB more, I will update this comparison with more details about these hosted MongoDB services!
