I'm currently evaluating the different cloud service providers to determine which is best for the use of NodeJS backend with Socket.IO implementation that is speedy. While i know that is really dependent on the physical location of their servers, i hope there is one in south-east asia.

I've already deployed on the following:

• Amazon EC2
• Heroku
• Appfog (doesnt seem like it works on it)

Any other good ones to recommend? Would be good if they have a free tier much like how AWS works.

Look forward to your opinions!

Note that at this time Heroku does not support web sockets, so any use of socket.io will have to degrade to a long-polling approach.

With your use of Socket.io in mind, I would recommend using Amazon EC2. The main advantage of many other hosting options in the past has been their easy of deployment and management of all your resources (think Heroku). Amazon has recently launched OpsWorks, which you can use to take care of most of that for you. If you don't have any complex, custom requirements then the basic Node set up should work for you.

Keep in mind that if you are using OpsWorks there are a few small things to keep in mind. Some of them are discussed in this question. Has anyone been successful deploying a node (express) app with Amazon OpsWorks?