Hosting talk

[Burz]

Not having a big deadline to get my konakart project online, I decided to try for the lowest priced hosting provider I could find with reasonable quality. Been through a number of providers since December with some interesting results:

GoDaddy: Don't recommend. Their MySQL support is old and their shared Tomcat is a total afterthought that can't handle much more than some lightweight jsps. As soon as you mention Java or Tomcat you will be mercilessly stonewalled by support.

Ubiquity: Not bad for a shared Tomcat. Can basically run Konakart. But they only do shared hosting and if you need a dedicated IP for SSL then forget it. Can't do port 80 or 843 access from Tomcat. Support was cowed by anything "Java".

Arvixe: Experienced hardware crash soon after signing up. Thereafter they couldn't keep Tomcat from crashing... seemed unable to setup mod_jk properly.

EatJ: Free trial accounts available, great for experimentation and can run KonaKart. But didn't answer my questions about specs for a paid account.

DailyRazor: You need their RazorBLAZE account at minimum to run KonaKart. Add $5/mo if you need an IP address. A bit pricey IMO and they say they are still gettin' around to refunding me before trial period is up. Hmmm...

4TVirtual: This one is a VPS. Rather inexpensive and have only seen good comments about them (incl. a report which rates them with very high uptime). Support is responsive and knowledgeable so far. They gave us two months free because of a billing hassle caused by their bank. They only offer VPS, so the usual tradeoffs apply: You get more control but also have to take care of firewall, ssh, etc. setup yourself so must be comfortable handling a Linux server. I also had to setup mod_jk myself, a non-trivial task (actually, I assumed I had to set it up... didn't ask support). Right now signing up for a year gets you a $13/mo rate with dedicated IP and 300MB memory, a better deal than Eapps.

In fact Eapps is the one obvious choice that I didn't try, and would have if 4T didn't work out.

As for Godaddy, I do recommend them for SSL certs. Very cheap and they don't work through the rather disturbing VeriSign racket. Search for SSL certs in Google then click on the Godaddy ad to get a discount.

I realize this falls somewhat outside of the scope of the Konakart group, as their product is aimed at in-house med-large projects. But its still a vital data point to see how easily an app can adapt to humble hosting constraints. The conclusion I have come to is that Tomcat apps in general do not faire well at all, and that the state of Java hosting appears to be a shambles compared to PHP, Python and Ruby. I ran into developer blogs that said "Java hosting kicked my @zz". This is one area that Sun and IBM need bear down on to secure the future of the platform, and that reflects on KonaKart indirectly.

Konakart itself is great and something I'll be sticking with for at least this one project, but if something happens to my current hosting service then I have less than a handful of affordable alternatives to choose from. Beyond those few alternatives, there is much negative variability from virtually unusable memory constraints to those shiny-new JDK 1.6 setups paired with obsolete Tomcat or Mysql, to being told you can't use port 80 or that support's lone "Java guy" will fix your problem in several days because he only comes in once a week. What PHP developer would put up with that at even $7/mo?

So that, in a nutshell, is my trip through Java hosting land. I hope some of it will be useful (or at least interesting) to readers here.

[ming]

Thanks for posting these experiences Burz,   I'm sure others will find them interesting.

We run our online demo on an eApps account and have found them to provide good support and high-availability.   Due to our particular requirements we have set up our online demos using a tomcat that we have installed ourselves (the normal KonaKart installation process actually), rather than the one that eApps provide.   eApps are the only ISP we know who provide KonaKart as a selectable application from their control panel.  This ease-of-installation might be appealing to some users.

We have also used GoDaddy in the past and our experiences were more positive than yours.   Again we set up our own tomcat for KonaKart (standard KonaKart installation) and didn't have any restrictions or problems.

Regards, Ming

[chackboom]

I also tried Godaddy and EATJ.

Godaddy is using shared Tomcat. It does not work for me.

EATJ is great. They provide private JVM. Try it. http://www.eatj.com/