Dru Devore's Blog

Call for reasonable Java hosting

Java can compete against other languages, scripting or not, even for small sites, but it needs the support of the industry and the availability of reasonable hosting to do so. I know that Java is not the same as PHP and other scripting languages but I would think that the hosting could at least keep up a little better than it has.

Question

My Experience

Problems

The Need

The Call

So who else would like to see something like this and how can we as a Java community do to get someone to do it?

I think that Sun should do something like this for small sites and offer it for free for development, demos, and Open Source projects. Like what SourceForge does but for Java deployment. Just think of the Java promotion this would provide.

Comments

• +1 for having Sun provide "starter hosting" for server-side Java projects. Many of my students are quite familiar with PHP--it is their language of choice for web projects because hosting is cheap and plentiful. When I teach a software engineering class, I say "no" to PHP, but at a cost. I then have the unenviable task of becoming sys admin, dealing with logins, GlassFish, and a database. No wonder few of my colleagues do the same. And that's a shame--today's student is tomorrow's software engineer, and we'd like them to have a positive experience with server-side Java.

  Posted by: cayhorstmann on March 01, 2008 at 02:42 PM

• I think if you want that kind of control you need a virtual server with your own IP address. The GlassFish V2 admin console isn't designed for a shared hosting environment, and the minimum requirements states 512 mb of memory. That's real physical memory dedicated to your virtual server, which is why it is expensive.

  I think GlassFish v3 will change the Java hosting market. It will load only what is needed for deployed applications on the fly so will use much less memory. The admin console will have roll based access control, and many other improvements that might make it usable in a shared hosting environment.

  What do you think would be a good price for cheap Java EE 5/6 hosting?

  Posted by: rdelaplante on March 01, 2008 at 06:29 PM

• Dru,

  I use Virtual dedicated server provided by godaddy which costs less than 30$ a month. I have pretty good success in using the different versions of Tomcat, JBoss, Liferay with the same. I have posted some of the tips in my Blog.

  Posted by: mksreddy on March 01, 2008 at 07:53 PM

• Kattare.com is by far the best ISP that I have ever used in the java space. They offer a lot of options and its affordable! Check them out.

  Posted by: smayzak on March 01, 2008 at 08:17 PM

• 
  I would advise going with a VPS based solution if you want total control. Find a host that uses Xen or some other virtualization technology. That way you get root access without the cost of an entire server. I use http://www.rimuhosting.com and it works great for me.

  Posted by: mbosch on March 02, 2008 at 01:15 AM

• Dru, try eapps.com. They offer a virtual server for $30/month. Currently, they only support Tomcat, but Glassfish is on the way.

  -Clint
  http://ccombs.net/weblog

  Posted by: ccombs on March 02, 2008 at 06:10 AM

• I've been using AO Industries since 1999 for my Java projects. Great prices, great support, low key. What more could you want? Feel free to contact me if you want more information.

  Posted by: jwynacht on March 02, 2008 at 08:42 AM

• This has been a concern of mine for some time; so much so I started to compile a list of java compatible hosting services, 'jhosts' (beware it is not up to date). Before the advent of VPS solutions, services were generally not production ready which meant that a dedicated server was the only way. Now companies like rimuhosting are providing such good services we have changed our hosting plans to use them for scalability, global presence and failover. Our core services use a mixture of managed dedicated and VPS hosted solutions, and while the former is 3+ times the price of the latter, we keep the option for various business reasons.

  If you are looking then I suggest this:

  shared vms are for demo servers, even the best of them are not production ready
  if you are going to pay for a private vm, then it is probably cheaper to get a VPS
  if you are not an expert then use rimuhosting
  if you are an expert then find the most reliable VPS you can and set it up the same way rimuhosting have.

  I don't work for rimuhosting, by the way, I am just a satisfied customer. If you don't like their standard offerings then you can just change it, the staff will help all they can (as fanatically as rackspace).

  Posted by: straun on March 02, 2008 at 02:58 PM

• I am using rimuhosting and they provide excellent support services. Mention Arvind Gupta (or any other rimuhosting customer) at the time of signing up the account and they will waive in set up charges also. arvind.bernaulli@gmail.com

  Posted by: bernaulli on March 03, 2008 at 04:37 AM

• I echo your call but it feels too late. Web sites are built with PHP and Ruby. I consider Java to be my preferred language, however, I find myself learning CodeIgniter, wordpress, and other framworks to get simple ideas on the web where others can try them. Furthermore, even if you did have affordable hosting, Java apps still seem dated. Most java frameworks have not caught on to the contemporary use of URL's. One in particular, Stripes, is better than most but doesn't get much attention.

  Posted by: tcowan on March 03, 2008 at 06:21 AM

• You can get by with a pure linux/solaris hosting as long as you give up using a huge, root-installed, one-appserver-to-bind-them-all approach. All you need is a directory and a ssh account. Java can be installed in any directory, and your webapp can bundle a http server (jetty/winstone) as a library to run itself. Hudson (the build server) does that. If you deploy it as a war file it works as expected but if you run it with "java -jar hudson.war" it also contains a main-method that finds itself in the classloader's classpath, then starts the webapp server with the path to the war file as parameter. Check the source code and see for yourself how simple it is.

  This approach gives you full control over the java process, including unlimited access to -X parameters.

  Posted by: eirikma on March 03, 2008 at 06:29 AM

• I have had a very good experience with htto://eapps.com . Very friendly and reasonable prices.

  Posted by: hchaudh1 on March 03, 2008 at 06:30 AM

• The problem here is not the hosting companies, it's Java.

  Save on a virtual server, there is no safe way to deploy in to a shared VM. None of the major VM vendors provide the control and safety that shared hosting really requires.
  Also, Java hosting is resource expensive as well compared to others. Even if we had a good shared VM model, it's still expensive to host Java applications.

  With box stock JSP and servlet, everything gets loaded in to the VM and thereby consumes some amount of memory. Most JSP implementations even load the entire page text in to memory as well. That's all well and good, but the problem is simply that once loaded, these artifacts tend to STAY in memory.

  So, now consider the classic cheap virtual hosting solution with a single Apache instance fronting PHP for several hundred lightly used web sites.

  PHP loads things on the fly, interprets them on the fly, and throws things away. That's one reason why PHP folks need to jump through hoops to increase performance. It's always being reloaded, reinterpreted, and tossed out for each page hit.

  The benefit of this is that you can scale your memory burden to the TRAFFIC that the site gets. That's the perfect model for overselling a HTTP Virtual Server host, since most sites get very little traffic.

  In the Java model, however, if you have 1000 different sites, and each one get a hit once a day, that's 1000 JSPs that are loaded in the VM and that, typically, STAY in the VM all day long. That means that someone who got a hit at 1am is still impacting the server 12 hours later at 1pm simply because the JVM doesn't do a good job of unloading classes and what not.

  In the PHP model, that 1am web hit came and went, never to be heard of again.

  So, that means that a Java site needs to be scaled to the number of ACCOUNTs on the site, rather than the actual TRAFFIC to the site (regardless of the accounts).

  That's a different revenue model.

  Then there's also the safety model. It is trivial to write a piece of Java code that can destroy a VM, suck up all of it heap. Once that's done, the VM needs to restart -- and this affects all of the users of the VM, rather than the malcontent who wrote the bad page. In PHP, a bad page is a bad page. System reaches internal limits, kills the process, Apache restarts it, and a single user has much less affect on other users.

  All of these factors weight against Java as cheap hosting solution. I think it would take a great amount of reengineering, both at the VM level AND at the container level to mitigate these issues and make Java friendlier to the bulk hosting providers.

  
  

  Posted by: whartung on March 03, 2008 at 10:04 AM

• I am using Metawerx (http://www.metawerx.net). Excellent and friendly support, many hosting plans, and very reasonable prices. They are based in Australia, I'm from Europe, but I'm happy to deal with the timezone differences.

  Posted by: devreeze on March 03, 2008 at 10:06 AM

• @whartung: If we just consider the simplest case of servlets, I can't see why you take a servlet out of service if it has not been used for some period (minute, hour, whatever). This wouldn't take much reengineering. Once out of service the classes and memory will be eligible for collection.
  As for filling the heap, I don't see the difference between PHP and Java. A bad PHP page will also impact other users while it executes. You can auto restart a Java VM too if it reaches some limit.

  Posted by: mthornton on March 03, 2008 at 12:17 PM

• @mthornton: Historically, the JVM hasn't had a fabulous record of cleaning up Java classes, nor have containers for that matter (lots of folks still hit PermGen errors doing a lot of JSP development or various incremental reloads on modern JVMs and Containers). Also, the difference between restarting a JVM and killing a PHP process is that using Apache's pre-fork model, when you kill a rogue PHP process, it's akin to killing a thread in Java. Specifically, it's only reseting a single connection, while all of the other connections stay alive. So beyond any particular runtime impact a PHP process may have on other users, once it reaches whatever limit failsafe the system puts on it, it's actual impact is only on the user it's serving. In contrast, reseting a JVM will impact ALL of the users that JVM is serving. It would be like restarting Apache, vs just a single connection.

  Posted by: whartung on March 03, 2008 at 10:28 PM

• +1 for having Sun provide "starter hosting" for free,

  Great idea : a Free Latest Java hosting with latest Glashfish and other features for learning also for non-profit small scale Java projects.

  Posted by: kishoresjava on March 04, 2008 at 02:09 AM

• I'd be happy if Sun just would provide hosting for Webstart apps. That is send the right mime type with the content and handle whether pack200 is to be used or not.
  My ISP doesn't send the right mime type, so Webstart doesn't start when the link is clicked. Providing hosting for these apps can only help the adoption of this underrated technology.
  

  Posted by: tim_dalton on March 04, 2008 at 05:34 AM

• @warthung has some really good points. It would be nice if SUN (or the OpenJDK community) would address them.

  Another advantage to PHP virtual hosting is that it's pretty much enabled out-of-box in every Linux distro. All you need to do is add some form of "Control Panel" (e.g. ) and you're in business as a PHP web host. With OpenJDK out, hopefully we'll see easier setup for Java hosting (on those VPS solutions at least)

  OpenJDK may also enable some community innovation in this area. Does anyone know of any good Java hosting solutions that are available as Open Source? Do any of the recommended Java ISPs reveal their setup/configuration recipes or collaborate with each other on solutions?

  Posted by: msgilligan on March 05, 2008 at 08:52 PM

• Darn, I should have used the "Preview" button for my above comment. I meant to link to ISPConfig and ended up making half the comment a hyperlink.

  (Preview doesn't seem to work so well, at least on Safari, either...)

  Posted by: msgilligan on March 05, 2008 at 08:56 PM

• I've been using eapps for a few years, and I've been pretty happy with them.

  Just to put some specific numbers on what whartung said...I see that I'm always using about 330MB of the 432MB that eapps allocates to me. That's being used all day, every day, even with no traffic. I happen to have a simple servlet using tomcat4.

  So I guess eapps is scaling based on number of accounts, and the question is whether they're making money charging people like me $30 a month to allocate 432MB to me all day every day. I have no idea, but I've never heard of a case where hardware costs where larger than "people" costs. I suspect that the hour a month or so they spend on tech support for me outweighs the cost of that memory I'm using.
  

  Posted by: atripp on March 07, 2008 at 01:22 PM

• I encountered the same problems in the past and started with a friend a new website: www.JavaHostel.com. It is intended to be an independent website where the people can add and rate their java hosting providers.

  Posted by: adiian on April 19, 2008 at 04:41 AM

• There's a site called Java Web Hosting that offers private Tomcat 6 instances for $13 a month.

  Posted by: geolook on June 13, 2008 at 03:13 PM

• Bad link in previous post, trying again... There's a site called Java Web Hosting that offers private Tomcat 6 instances for $13 a month.

  Posted by: geolook on June 13, 2008 at 03:15 PM

• Here is a list of hosts that seem to be reasonable and they are enterprise servers, not just Tomcat for servlets.

  Java Hosting

  Posted by: ddevore on June 19, 2008 at 05:35 AM

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