Throughout the development of NodeChef, we have spent lots of time listening to user feedback, fixing bugs, and adding features that users ask for. It wasn’t much of a surprise that data portability came up time and time again.
Data lock-in arises when you are unable to move your data from one service to another should you choose to. Locking your users in, of course, has the advantage of making it harder for them to leave you for a competitor. Likewise, if your competitors lock their users in, it is harder for those users to move to your product.
Data lock-in is a very legitimate concern. Consider a scenario where prices are hiked up without your consent, or a feature critical to your application is never added to or is removed from the service, leaving your project incomplete and lacking important functionality. Or consider a scenario where you are receiving poor service, or a scenario where the service shuts down and ceases to exist. Without the ability to extract your data at any time, any of the above scenarios could put your entire business or project at serious risk.
At NodeChef, our attitude has always been that users should be able to control their data. And that means they should be able to get their data out at any point in time. Period. There should be no additional monetary cost to do so, and perhaps most importantly, the amount of effort required to get the data out should be constant, regardless of the amount of data. We prefer to spend our engineering efforts on innovation than building bigger walls and stronger doors that prevent users from leaving.
You can easily export your data from NodeChef in an instant using the database connection string. We also let users have complete control over their backups. We make backups of your data every 16 hours, allowing us to restore user data should disaster strike. Soon we will enable daily dumps to a specified S3 bucket of your choice and also backup your database oplog on a daily basis to allow for point in time restore of the database. Customers can also power their apps with a database hosted somewhere else.
Making it easier for users to export their data has greatly increased their trust in us. This has reflected in the growth we continue to see. We are super excited to continue to provide the best hosting experience in the market for Node.js and MongoDB apps.