Ecommerce Agency Regal IT Pushes Node.js Apps from Git to Production with Cloudways Velocity

About Regal IT

Regal IT is a UK ecommerce agency specialising in WooCommerce, Shopify, custom development, hosting and ecommerce automation, supporting businesses from websites and infrastructure through to bespoke integrations. It also builds commercial products, including RMA Pro for Shopify.

When taking RMA Pro from local development into production, Adam Harris of Regal IT found most providers made hosting a Node.js application harder than necessary, with separate infrastructure to configure. He wanted one managed service handling the server plumbing.

After more than four years on Cloudways, Harris turned to Cloudways Velocity and found everything folded into one managed service. Effort that would have gone into infrastructure went into the product instead. Read on to see how Cloudways Velocity delivered.

The Challenge: Node.js Hosting Complexity

RMA Pro for Shopify initially ran purely in local development while Harris searched for the right production hosting platform.

– RMA Pro’s return management capabilities, including rule-based logic, exchanges, store credit, and return labels, compared against typical basic RMA plugins. (Source: regal-it.com)

For a commercial application designed to sit inside merchants’ daily Shopify workflows, that decision carried real weight, and the options he evaluated kept adding layers rather than removing them.

“I found that a lot of other providers made hosting a Node.js application feel more complicated than it needed to be, with several pieces of infrastructure to configure or manage separately.” — Adam Harris

The alternative to those providers was doing it all himself: setting up NGINX, PM2 and the surrounding server configuration, then maintaining that environment indefinitely.

For a developer, that represents an entire layer of setup and upkeep that adds no value to the actual product.

As Adam Harris put it, “I wanted an all-in-one service where I could deploy the application without having to build and maintain the hosting stack around it myself.”

Regal IT handles everything from ongoing ecommerce support and optimisation to full plugin and application development, so infrastructure that is straightforward to deploy and manage is important to the business.

The Solution: Managed Node.js on Velocity

Trust came first. Harris had already been using Cloudways for more than four years, so there was an existing level of confidence in both the platform and the company behind it.

Velocity extended that relationship into exactly the territory RMA Pro needed.

“Velocity gave me the combination I was looking for: straightforward Node.js hosting, Git-based deployment, managed infrastructure, backups, SSL, patching and strong performance in one service.” — Adam Harris

The Git-based workflow fits naturally into how RMA Pro is built. The application is developed in GitHub, and deployed directly from Git removes a long list of manual steps when pushing new versions.

As Adam Harris explained, “It means I can concentrate on developing and testing the application rather than thinking about how to get each build onto the server.”

Velocity’s pre-configured stack completed the picture. Rather than assembling a production environment piece by piece, Harris received one that was production-ready from the outset.

– Cloudways Velocity supports Node.js frameworks by use case, from Next.js, Remix, and Express to Astro, Angular, and n8n automation workflows. (Source: cloudways.com)

Flat monthly pricing sealed the decision because, in his words, “it makes it much easier to understand the real hosting cost of a commercial application as it grows.”

The Result: Refocused Developer Time

Regal IT did not run a formal before-and-after performance test, so Harris is careful not to quote benchmark figures. The gains have been operational, and they show up every day.

Getting RMA Pro into production became significantly more efficient, and routine server administration no longer competes with development and support work. That balance is particularly valuable for ecommerce software, where reliability matters.

With operating system patching, SSL certificates and backups handled by the platform, Harris notes, “I can focus more of my time on the application and our customers.”

– Cloudways Velocity’s core features: Git-based deployment, fully managed operations, developer controls, enterprise security, and predictable pricing. (Source: cloudways.com)

End users feel the difference too. While no formal response-time measurements were taken, RMA Pro feels consistently fast when opening and using the application, without the initial delay that platforms with cold starts can introduce.

As Adam Harris observed, “For an app that sits inside a merchant’s day-to-day Shopify workflow, that consistent responsiveness is important.”

“Cloudways Velocity has made deploying a Node.js application feel much closer to deploying a managed website: straightforward, predictable and without unnecessary infrastructure overhead. It lets me spend my time building the product rather than managing the platform underneath it.” — Adam Harris

RMA Pro is only the first major project Regal IT is running on Velocity, and Harris sees the platform becoming an important part of the company’s application hosting as Regal IT grows.

– The Cloudways Velocity dashboard overview, showing plan details alongside real-time RAM, CPU, and disk usage monitoring for a Starter plan. (Source: cloudways.com)

The team plans to keep developing RMA Pro, build additional Shopify apps and explore further SaaS products, confident that a managed Node.js platform built around a Git workflow lets the application portfolio grow without the infrastructure-management workload growing at the same rate.

Push Node.js Apps from Git to Production.

Cloudways Velocity pairs Git-based deployment with managed Node.js hosting, handling SSL, backups, and patching while you build.

Try Cloudways Velocity