Koding vs. Nitrous.IO vs. Codeanywhere

I like the editor and all the themes I can pick from. I started using Koding pretty early on after an invite. After experiencing sluggishness when turning on my VMs (had free account, VM's turn off 15 mins. after logging out) I decided to get on a paid plan so I can have an always on VM. This did not help. I was still experiencing sluggish VM's and also it did not help that Koding had a free storage space promotion that I believe their servers weren't ready to handle. I could not access my VM's on some evenings. I'd wait over an hour and still had no access. This one time I was working on something and my VM's were acting stupid. I tried restarting them, then they wouldn't turn on. So I just left my computer and when I came back and signed in again it was like one of my VM's was cleared out and I had a new one. My files were lost. Support was good, they manage to get my files back but a couple of them were corrupted, seems like some sort of system output wrote over them. Overall I had a very bad experience using Koding. I believe the lack the resources because most of the time I couldn't even view the files on my VM. I did like that the customer service was quick to respond and that it is centered around a social experience. I cancelled my subscription after such a bad experience. $19/month for something you can't access during peak hours is a ripoff. Customer service was great though as I did complain once and they credited one month to my account. However, it sucks that I lost some files. Maybe it'll be worth it when their computers are more powerful.

Contrary to the other reviewers experience, I've had no issues with downtime. In fact, as of today, my VM has been up 97 days!

These guys pump out features like no one's business. Take a look at their very active changelog: https://koding.com/Activity/Announcement/changelog

The community aspect is super awesome and they have a very engaged community. Overall, I like the value that I am getting for the money that I am paying them ($9/month).

Highly recommended.

It uses the user IaaS infrastructure - by default AWS

I use Nitrous.io as my primary development environment now for MeteorJS app development. I can work from anywhere, anytime. The environments are reliable, fast, and support is good. Been hacking away for about 3 months full-time and no hitches.

Nothing but good things to say about Nitrous; it's fast, reliable, easy to use and appears to have very few chinks in the armour.

It integrates easily with Github, easy to install Drupal, and amazingly enough it runs Magento well straight off the bat!

Definitely recommend.

Over time I think more and more that Codeanywhere is a waste of money.

They prioritise absolutely pointless features over general UX. Let's take a very simple situation... you're coding a page and suddenly you're logged out and redirected to the homepage login form, so everything you've coded leading up to that redirect is lost for good. You can't go back, even after you log in, and you can't get the code back because it didn't save (because you were not logged in).

I can think of at least 4 different, more practical ways in which session expiration could be handled to stop this frustration for users, but Codeanywhere would rather have their developers working on additional container support or new syntax highlighting for languages nobody has even heard of.

Do not waste your money on this garbage. I've been with them long enough to go through at least 2-3 serious situations that could have been prevented if the platform was properly developed.