Monday, June 8, 2009

Which hosting party to choose?



For some personal project I'm currently looking for a hosting party.
I started very open minded to use whatever technology to build the web application from Grails, Spring Roo, Ruby on Rails to CakePHP or even Drupal.

I don't have that many requirements:


  1. Hosting party should be a respected company

  2. Ability to scale out easily

  3. Offer Subversion service to manage my application sources

  4. And (very important for my own wallet!) it should be affordable



I've looked into Google App Engine but for now I have decided not to go that direction. Main reason is the lack of a relational database.

For now I decided to go for a Grails or Ruby on Rails solution. I never developed a full Ruby on Rails application (except reading/trying some tutorials in the past) but maybe this is the time to give it a try... It's never bad to learn a new language and I think I will pick it up very quickly as it's concepts are very similar to Grails. I still need to think about this and will decide later which of the two I will use.

Based on hosting experiences within the Grails community I already made a shortlist of hosting parties and contacted them already with some question. This is my shortlist so far:


I have some time to make a decision so any comments are appreciated.

10 comments:

jan said...

Just my 2 cents.

grailstutorials.com I have started with StandardPlus plan but after
some time I was experiencing OutOfMemory errors. I am very sure I could improve memory usage but I just simply switched to StandardMax. Now I have more than enough memory, usually having around 120 MB unused. Even in peak hours (around 30 visitors per hour) I am not noticing some
influence on performance.

I have found cheaper hosting companies than eApps but keep staying with eApps because they have very good documentation how to deploy applications (I have no experience with deploying web apps) and how to setup server. Also support is very good. My experience so far is that
they were replaying to mails in minutes.

Dean said...

Marcel would you consider hosting the application yourself? Are you expecting a heap of traffic? If not you really can't beat the price point.

Marcel Overdijk said...

@Dean:

I don't know if I will be getting a lot of traffic... I hope so ;-)

To be honestly I don't have a server/desktop. I just have my laptop which is not always connected to the internet.

Cheers,
Marcel

Glenn Saqui said...

Have you look at morph? It has a grails plugin and the small app that we deployed into it recently went extremely smoothly. There is a free developer account which allows you to connect to either postgres or mysql and seems like a good place to start.

bluerayman said...

I recently started up with slicehost.com

(they were acquired by rackspace) I've been happy as is one of my friends who followed my lead.

We are both running Jetty6 on Ubuntu, which will handle Grails wonderfully -- as well as a number of other things you're likely to throw at it. These plans start at $20/month. Please PM me if you pursue this.

Marcel Overdijk said...

@bluerayman:
Which plan are you using on slicehost and what kind of traffic does your site has?

Cheers,
Marcel

Unknown said...

I use my local hosting service. I use virtual dedicated server which allows me to do anything with my server. I use Tomcat and PostgreSQL. I pay around 19$/month. I get unlimited bandwith, 512MB RAM and 10GB. For my small application it is enough so far.

Marcel Overdijk said...

@Glenn Saqui
Mor.ph has shut down AppSpace and only will offer AppCloud in the future. I can't find any pricing information anymore for AppCloud but last time I checked it was to much for me.

Anonymous said...

Nice guidelines to choose hosting service. It will help all who wants to take application hosting service for their business.

kalayl said...

I'm looking into cloudfoundry+ec2 at the moment. If it does what it says on the tin well enough then I think it will be compelling. The price is less so, but I'm willing to pay for convenience.

I'm steering clear of GAE for the moment due to lack of RDBMS support. When they add that I'm all over it.

My fallback is a private VPS I rent currently.