Java web hosting

As you may have found out, this site is a java web application. This brings the question that I also had to ask myself: where can it be hosted?

The easiest answer is: my own computer (since I'm running it 24/7 anyway). However, my ISP has a stupid policy of blocking incoming connections on port 80. I could use another port, but then "http://www.aditsu.net:8000" doesn't look quite as good.

The next option is to use one of the millions of web hosting services on the internet. Price is an issue though, so I looked for shared hosting. Only a small fraction of the shared hosting services support java, and most of those who do, offer it optionally, for a higher price. I'm not sure what the main reason is; I guess either java web applications are harder to support, or the demand is too low.

After searching a bit, I decided to go with godaddy. It was the cheapest I found, and a relatively big name, I figured they must do a decent job. Big mistake. Godaddy really sucks! After struggling with lots of problems and absolutely atrocious support, I finally gave up.

Then I started looking again for hosting options. I found a few providers that seemed good, such as MochaHost, HostIgnition, WestHost and EATJ, but they were more expensive and none of them was compelling enough. The next option was virtual dedicated hosting (or VPS) but I found that prices generally started from US$20/month which was way more than what I was willing to pay.

Finally, around that time, the company where I was working went down and I went back to my previous job, working for a friend. He has a couple of servers in the office (which I had previously helped set up) and kindly let me host the site on one of them. This way I got total control and I didn't need to pay anything.

One problem with self-hosted servers, though, is stability. And the track record in that office was not very good, for various reasons. That doesn't matter so much for one personal site, but it starts getting serious if I want to publish more sites. And that would also stretch my use of the company's server for my own purposes.

Therefore I started looking into VPS again, and found some cheaper options, but still wasn't sure. After talking to some friends, I found out about the Rackspace Cloud and decided to go with it. The starting price is about US$11/month (with 256MB RAM), billed hourly, and they support my favorite distro too. And did I mention their live support is awesome?

The service is called "Cloud Servers" but it's pretty much VPS, with some clustering options. Right now I think it's one of the best choices, at least for starting. I'll review this when I find the need to scale :)