[btouellette]

Cloud9 used to be my primary development environment for anything Node-based or intended for the web. Loved the features and the anywhere-access of an online IDE. Then Amazon bought it and effectively removed their free-tier by billing you for the AWS hours the environment took to run (I know there is an AWS free tier but it is one-time and expires after a year). When looking around for a replacement Repl.it was the only other thing remotely close in features.

The only two issues that I ran into was not having the ability to run local DBs and Chrome reporting the web preview page for my replit as containing malware and not letting me load it. C9 basically just dropped you to a Linux shell where you could install and run your own copy of Mongo or Postgres. This seems like it would satisfy a lot of use cases and running your DB on an external provider isn't too tough anyway. The second issue is probably just par for the course when allowing user executed code and web content to be hosted from your servers although I never got hit with the same on Cloud9.