Matt RaibleMatt Raible is a Web Developer and Java Champion. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

The Angular Mini-Book The Angular Mini-Book is a guide to getting started with Angular. You'll learn how to develop a bare-bones application, test it, and deploy it. Then you'll move on to adding Bootstrap, Angular Material, continuous integration, and authentication.

Spring Boot is a popular framework for building REST APIs. You'll learn how to integrate Angular with Spring Boot and use security best practices like HTTPS and a content security policy.

For book updates, follow @angular_book on Twitter.

The JHipster Mini-Book The JHipster Mini-Book is a guide to getting started with hip technologies today: Angular, Bootstrap, and Spring Boot. All of these frameworks are wrapped up in an easy-to-use project called JHipster.

This book shows you how to build an app with JHipster, and guides you through the plethora of tools, techniques and options you can use. Furthermore, it explains the UI and API building blocks so you understand the underpinnings of your great application.

For book updates, follow @jhipster-book on Twitter.

10+ YEARS


Over 10 years ago, I wrote my first blog post. Since then, I've authored books, had kids, traveled the world, found Trish and blogged about it all.

What's the best Java Hosting Solution?

A friend recently asked me who I'd recommend for a Java hosting provider. Since I get asked this question every-so-often, it seemed appropriate to post my answer here.

  1. KGB Internet - I use KGB for this site. I have my own JVM and have full control over what I want to install. I can control Tomcat versions and upgrade as needed. I don't know if I'd recommend him for a business site as he can take up to 12 hours to respond to requests.
  2. Kattare - These guys will give you your own Tomcat instance and seem to have reasonable prices. They do seem to take quite some time to respond to requests (24-48 hours). I have a free instance that I use for a non-profit, so that could be the reason.
  3. Contegix - These guys are far-and-away the best company for Java-based hosting. They're not cheap though. However, they have the best customer service in the business - often responding to e-mails in less than a minute.

Do you agree with these recommendations? If not, who do you recommend for Java hosting and why?

Posted in Java at Feb 07 2009, 10:21:28 AM MST 38 Comments
Comments:

I've had a really good experience with eApps.com. You get a full CentOS 5 VPS with their Standard Plus plan. I've never had a problem with their support, either. Very responsive, and a real nice control panel to add/remove domains, etc. Their SSL prices are real nice, as well.

Posted by Jeff Hubbach on February 07, 2009 at 05:31 PM MST #

Why not Amazon Web Services? Since the introduction of Elastic Block Storage and Elastic IP's, all the previous short comings have been addressed. Full control over your environment, backups are a breeze with snapshots to S3.

Posted by Wille on February 07, 2009 at 05:43 PM MST #

@Willie - are you currently using AWS to host applications? If so, your suggestion is valuable. I'd like to avoid "what about XXX?" comments and keep it to "I've had great experience with XXX".

Posted by Matt Raible on February 07, 2009 at 05:47 PM MST #

I'm currently hosting www.moretasteleague.com on Amazon EC2. I'm using a service called Cloud Foundry (http://www.cloudfoundry.com) to make it happen. It's incredibly easy to use. You basically upload your war, and point/click for the setup you want -- for instance, if you have a heavy traffic site, you can start up 5 app servers with a mysql master/slave, or if it's a low traffic site you can run everything on one server, or even better yet if the traffic is cyclical, like www.moretasteleague.com, which is busy on football days when commercials are airing (Saturday/Sunday/Monday), you can easily switch between setups, so Saturday - Monday I run a cluster of servers, but the rest of the week I consolidate everything into one server, which cuts costs dramatically.

In terms of actual cost, cloudfoundry is in beta, so aside from the ridiculously cheap cost of EC2, it's free. I'm not sure what they plan to charge after beta, but the tools used to build the site have been open sourced, which I've found easy to use - and I actually contributed some code to the project - so you could go free all the way if you wanted.

Posted by Dustin Whitney on February 07, 2009 at 06:31 PM MST #

I use Kattare, and they bend over backwards for me. It may be that non-profit took a lower priority, I just wanted to mention my experience.

Posted by Daniel Hinojosa on February 07, 2009 at 06:35 PM MST #

Why not go with some VPS host like SliceHost, where you will get complete control of the box and can install jetty or tomcat or whatever!

Posted by Subbu Allamaraju on February 07, 2009 at 06:54 PM MST #

We use Slicehost and cannot really say anything bad of them. Very flexible, reliable (so far) and inexpensive. We run there JBoss and Tomcat w/o any problems. It's not "drag and drop" though, but it gives us more control as our configurations are really-really custom :-)

Posted by Olexiy Prokhorenko on February 07, 2009 at 09:58 PM MST #

in our case http://dailyrazor.com was good. A lot of our mashups with a heavy traffic (like messaging: http://sn.linkstore.ru) are there

Posted by Den on February 07, 2009 at 10:31 PM MST #

Rimuhosting (yes that is their real name) has been great. They give you a Xen host for a great price -- they really know what they are doing in the java space and are polite as can be.

Posted by Keith Weinberg on February 07, 2009 at 10:41 PM MST #

kattare have provided me with reliable Java hosting for a number of years. If you want to manage your own server, then I can also recommend slicehost for reliability and cost.

Posted by Nigel on February 07, 2009 at 10:43 PM MST #

I haven't done more than a little experimenting with them, but you can't beat Stax for either ease or price. http://www.stax.net/

Posted by Curt Cox on February 08, 2009 at 03:35 AM MST #

I've also had good experiences with eapps in the past (1+ years ago). I don't have a need for a application hosting site now but I had no complaints when I used them.

Posted by Mike on February 08, 2009 at 06:27 AM MST #

I use GoDaddy virtual dedicated server (29.99/ A month). I manage 8 domains with 6 java based web applications on my server (Jboss 4.2.1) and 2 static web apps (Kids Photos).

Everything I see someone suggesting EC2 for these kind of things, I feel its just a over kill and someone got really too much time at their hand.

Posted by Kumar Mettu on February 08, 2009 at 07:12 AM MST #

I second Rimuhosting. They're a New Zealand based provider but they have three data centers or so. Their support has been top notch over the last few years I've been with them and they make Java deployment a breeze.

Prices are good, especially in their Dallas data center, the for the level of support you get.

Posted by Mike Bosch on February 08, 2009 at 07:33 AM MST #

I use VPSLink. They are much cheaper then the ones listed so far but its VPS so you'll have to get your hands dirty.

Posted by Adam Gent on February 08, 2009 at 02:05 PM MST #

Matt:

I am currently using AWS, moved most of my hosting (except e-mail and DNS) to AWS back in September.

Host a number of Java-based webapps (with MySQL backend) there, have had no downtime since I started (using availability zone east-1c, which seems very dependable).

With ElasticFox, it is a breeze to manage the servers, very simple to automate backups, restoration (which I've never had to use, but done a few dry runs).

I usually start off with a Ubuntu image (currently using 8.04, because of the long term support for updates) and customize it for my needs (add Java, Maven, MySQL etc).

All in all, I feel I have more control over my environment with AWS than any previous hosting provider, so I am extremely happy with my choice.

Posted by Wille on February 08, 2009 at 03:52 PM MST #

I'd add to Wille's AWS comment, that I actually have experienced a failure on AWS, but I look at it as a good thing and not a bad thing.

I received an email from AWS one day that said one of the servers in my cluster was having hardware problems, so I simply started another cluster and shut the other down. It was really easy to do with Cloud Foundry (point click).

Hardware failure is going to happen, AWS makes dealing with it a snap.

Posted by Dustin Whitney on February 08, 2009 at 04:00 PM MST #

depending on your needs, I've had good experience with spry hosting and their VPS, provided you're willing to install a few things yourself. Email support is quick...

Posted by James Law on February 08, 2009 at 11:09 PM MST #

I third Rimuhosting http://rimuhosting.com. These guys are magnificent and the support is out of this world. As an example, a few weeks ago I emailed them and said - can you set me up a Subversion server on my host? 12 minutes later emailed back - "done". Outstanding.

Posted by Adrian Parker on February 09, 2009 at 09:42 AM MST #

Hi,

I am very satisfied with http://www.dailyrazor.com. The support is great, they usually answer me in less than one hour. The price is reasonable. I can restart a Tomcat whenever I want.

http://javanus.com/blogs

Posted by Javanus on February 09, 2009 at 11:43 AM MST #

Has anyone used Mocha Hosting?

They are very well priced.

Posted by J on February 09, 2009 at 01:58 PM MST #

Matt

Thanks for posting the question online :). I finally settled with rimuhosting and I am glad I did as I can see that 3 people have highly recommended them. So far I am very happy with them, and I agree that their support is top notch. Their documentation is very good and human readable. I particularly like how they are security concious and you can see that from their documentation (which you can check yourself as it is available without being a member... lots of howtos). And you get your own server so you can install and run whatever you want. I also tried oxxus.net before and would strongly *not* advised them as they were extremely careless with security (like sending passwords in email...). Amazon is something I am looking at as well, but if you want to have a server up and running all the time (ex: for email/blog), it will cost at least around $70 a month for their lower-end server.

Posted by Yan Pujante on February 09, 2009 at 03:25 PM MST #

I would recommend mor.ph. They have a free development version.

Posted by Roshan Shrestha on February 09, 2009 at 03:31 PM MST #

I'd fourth Rimuhosting. I've only used their VPS service but they have always been very helpful and quick to respond to requests.

Posted by Ryan on February 09, 2009 at 03:34 PM MST #

Hello, I was looking for mega cheap JAVA HOSTING. and I found http://javaprovider.net Highly recommended!

Posted by Clare on February 09, 2009 at 05:42 PM MST #

Hello, I was looking for mega cheap JAVA HOSTING. and I found http://javaprovider.net Highly recommended!

Posted by Clare on February 09, 2009 at 05:43 PM MST #

I've been using simplyewebhosting.com's VPS package and have been really happy with the service. It's not necessarily a "Java Hosting Solution", but they did preconfigure my server with Tomcat, PHP and mySQL. PostgreSQL is also available preconfigured. I've been using it with Spring MVC, JSF, and Flex.

Posted by brian on February 09, 2009 at 08:30 PM MST #

@Matt - What size JVM heap do you get on KGB Internet? I'm looking for a place to host my wife's online store (a Grails app) and the price looks good, but I'm concerned about overall memory/performance.

Posted by Matt Stine on February 09, 2009 at 10:55 PM MST #

@Matt - my CATALINA_OPTS are set to the following:

-server -Xms256M -Xmx256M -Duser.timezone=America/Denver

I also have unlimited bandwidth, which is nice considering I served up 80 GB last month. ;-)

Posted by Matt Raible on February 09, 2009 at 11:29 PM MST #

I am using eapps.com. At time of decision, i narrowed two, eapps and rimuhosting. But eapps appealed to me. So far no problems.

Advice for new clients, you can negotiate memory and disk space using competitors offers.

Posted by ashish jain on February 11, 2009 at 11:01 AM MST #

I fifth Rimuhosting. Those guys really go out of their way to help out with anything at anytime.

Posted by Stephen Pasco on February 12, 2009 at 12:08 AM MST #

Media Temple. It doesn't specialize in Java but with their dedicated virtual server, it's possible.

Posted by Michael on February 12, 2009 at 04:29 AM MST #

Been with DailyRazor (www.dailyrazor.com) for 3+ years now so far they've been great and their pricing is very reasonable.

Posted by Benoit on February 12, 2009 at 09:17 PM MST #

A group of coworkers have pooled our money to get a full colo server at tummy.com. It's not cheap - $150/month total, but we have complete control of the box and can do a full setup - not just tomcat and a database server for our own low-traffic apps, we have also set up subversion, mantis (bug tracking), artifactory (so we control our maven repository), simple apache sites for friends and family, etc. We used to do email, but it's easier to farm that out to google. Could we get it cheaper by farming out all services? free/low cost subversion here, free/low cost bug tracking there, free/low cost friend-and-family hosting elsewhere? Probably, but that would take more time and effort to track. We find it easier to just put everything in one place.

Posted by Bear on February 13, 2009 at 01:49 AM MST #

I use eapps all the time, but they have been down all day and both my apps that are hosted are offline. No reply from them when i emailed them this morning.

P.s. I use this nice little free service to monitor my apps

http://www.montastic.com

Posted by redd on February 14, 2009 at 04:40 PM MST #

I use eapps.com for many of my customers. They have good prices and a wide variety of plans. I have had to use their backup services a few times and their response was very quick often within 5 minutes of the time I entered the support ticket. I also use mocha hosting as they offer a few more interesting applications our of the box and have a slightly lower price. The downside is their memory limitations. The thing I don't like about any of the hosting solutions is the super small amount of disk space that they give you out of the box. When you add memory or disk they seem to want a large amount of money for incremental changes.

I recently have tested mor.ph for hosting my grails applications and they scale very well as they are cloud based. We were able to scale one of our applications recently across the cloud with ease. They also support cloud based storage and they have grails plugins to make deployment of grails applications a one step operation.

Posted by Scott Ryan on February 15, 2009 at 11:40 PM MST #

Javaprovider.net is cool. You can try free trial. I recommended them I have account within them for 2 months.

Posted by bugerjava on February 21, 2009 at 07:16 AM MST #

We hosted our java application on hostignition.com. There support is very good and usually get back to us within few minutes. There pricing are very reasonable and have different plans to choose out.

Posted by Madan Narra on March 04, 2009 at 05:46 AM MST #

Post a Comment:
Comments are closed for this entry.