Javalobby - Comments for "Hosting Java Web Applications: Why Is It Still So Hard?"

64M is Tomcat's default heap

geolook — Wed, 14 May 2008 10:05:13 -0400

64M is Tomcat's default heap size - it's more than enough for well written apps. If you're getting 500K+ page views a day all of which make calls to the DB, it's a different story that should probably be on a VPS if not a dedicated.

Yeah, but it's $13 for a

rk29 — Wed, 14 May 2008 09:39:27 -0400

Yeah, but it's $13 for a developer JVM with onyl 64M ram. It's $20 for a 128M JVM, which puts it at the same level as a typical VPS. Hmm. Actually, a little less since the $20 price point usually includes 256M RAM. For that you pay $25 on that site, which make sense since they are doing the maintenance.

All in all it looks very comparable to VPS.

A private JVM avoids the

geolook — Tue, 13 May 2008 23:36:27 -0400

A private JVM avoids the memory and security problems of shared hosting by giving each user their own space - sort of like a mini virtual private server. They are coming way down in price - http://www.cheap-jsp-hosting.com is as low as $13 a month.

emacadie wrote:I think that

sky_HALud — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 05:34:31 -0400

emacadie wrote:

I think that for servlet hosting, VPS might be the way to go. Hosting companies that have good servlet hosting seem to wind up costing as much as VPS does, so why not go that route?

Eric, managing a VPS is a considerable task while a private JVM is managed by the hosting provider. Additionally, for shared hosting accounts you usually get a management console (CPanel/Plesk etc.) by default, something that you pay heavily for on a VPS (think of 10$+).

emacadie wrote:

It seems like over the past few years, shared hosting has gone down in price significantly, especially considering that they now offer a lot more hard drive space and bandwidth than a few years ago. But servlet hosting prices have not really changed, and they do not seem to offer more memory or disk space than a few years ago.

From what I've seen, RAM prices didn't go down that much during the last couple of years, while disk space became way much cheaper and so did bandwith. And since Java web applications are much more memory hungry while idle (compared to the CGI execution model), this could explain it.

I think that for servlet

emacadie — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:35:51 -0400

I think that for servlet hosting, VPS might be the way to go. Hosting companies that have good servlet hosting seem to wind up costing as much as VPS does, so why not go that route?

Quote:Ray, it's good to know

rk29 — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 09:28:21 -0400

Quote:

Ray, it's good to know that you are in the hosting business. Did you attempt to provide shared hosting for Java?

Actually, my service is VPS hosting, which means I host instances of complete linux systems. What runs on top really doesn't matter to me. Memory is managed in a static fashion - each linux instance gets a fixed amount of RAM, and a fixed amount of disk. I can change the allocations, but I have it configured to NOT change them dynamically. This is intentional, since I want to guarantee that each instance has it's full allotment available. It makes the service more expensive, but it's serving a different purpose than simple virtual hosting.

Honestly, I really haven't looked much at shared Java hosting. I only know that from my limited experience with Tomcat, that it's not something that I would like to do.

Quote:

What parts of OSGi do you think that could ease Java web deployments?

I've not been too fond of the container model. It seems very heavy to me. Lately I've been embedding jetty into my applications, and OSGi allows me to dynamically install and remove services in a very clean fashion. I'm just exploring this area now, but I hope that it will lead to something that works well for me. Mainly I like the programming model that I can use with OSGi, where services are registered, and dynamically injected into other services using declarative services. There are still issues, but it's coming along.

rk29 wrote:That said, I

sky_HALud — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 07:49:07 -0400

rk29 wrote:

That said, I would have no problem with putting 10 virtual hosted php sites onto a single VPS, whereas putting a tomcat instance I'd recommend only one. Not that tomcat needs the full capacit, but that it's easier to manage those php virtual hosts.

Ray, it's good to know that you are in the hosting business. Did you attempt to provide shared hosting for Java? We all would like to hear some more thoughts about this. Previous posts did mention Java's lack of control over threads as one of the reliability issues. Having the ability to impose limits on memory and processor usage, arbitrary interruption etc. would certainly be nice.

rk29 wrote:

I'm also a developer, and generally prefer java over php. I wish there were a better story for deploying java web apps. To that end, I've been working with OSGi, and I think there is something there worth using, but it's not yet at the point where it is easily deployed.

What parts of OSGi do you think that could ease Java web deployments? Is that the fact that you have better application lifecycle management than those that come with the popular Java web containers?

I think a major part of the

jwenting — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 01:43:50 -0400

I think a major part of the problem finding Java hosting on the low end of the market has nothing whatsoever to do with complexity of the work and everything with the type of people starting and running hosting companies at that end of the market.

Those people are typically Linux fanatics, with a decade of "hatred" of Microsoft and Java under their belts, so they won't even consider hosting Java even if they had skills exceeding those needed to create virtual hosts on Apache.
Some have bowed under pressure and started hosting Frontpage extensions because the home user and small business (their customers) often ask about those, since those users often use Frontpage to create their websites and Frontpage assumes Frontpage extensions to be available by default unless you tell it otherwise.
Java has no such penetration in the low end of the market of web designers (which is hardly surprising as Java was never aimed for web development at those people, where Microsoft very agressively targets ASP at them).

So it's a political/religious and economic issue more than a technology issue.
One could host a cluster of JBoss or Tomcat instances just as easily as a cluster of Apache instances. But these people don't want to, the very thought never even enters their mind, and they're still under the impression (from all the reports they saw on slashdot a decade ago and regurgitated there every few weeks) that "Java is slow", "Java is not secure", etc. etc.

If you'll pardon the

rk29 — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 12:17:09 -0400

If you'll pardon the shameless plug, I run dataslab.com, which provides a vps with 256M ram, 512M swap, and 20G disk for $20 (US) per month.

I wanted to note two things:

1. Those specs are excellent for running a tomcat instance.

2. The $20 price point is fairly common in the vps industry, as are those specs.

It doesn't take too much looking to find a VPS provider with similar specs for the same price. The $30 mentioned in the article is above the norm.

whartung wrote: PHP is cheap

sky_HALud — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 09:22:51 -0400

whartung wrote:

Will, that's exactly the reason why PHP hosting is cheap and simple. This makes me conclude that if Java were to seriously compete with PHP on budget hosting it would be using a shared JVM hosting environment. This is the closest equivalent of the PHP model. You have one big JVM with all the available RAM allocated to it and, in theory, the web container manages the contexts as efficiently as possible. And the Java web application model does scale better than PHP.

Yet we now that shared hosting is a nightmare. I see two reasons for this happening:

Setting up such a web container is difficult and requires in-depth knowledge about Java and JVM internals, something the average hosting provider does not have. This could be solved by creating preconfigured standard packages of Tomcat/Resin/GlassFish etc. that are ready for such tasks.
There are technology limits on what the JVM and web containers can do in isolating web contexts and providing proper context lifecycle management (deploy/redeploy/undeploy).

I suspect the most unconfortable reason (number 2) to be the issue here. As a sidenote, I've heard that GlassFish v3 will focus on this (see comment #2 from here), but I don't know specifics. Is there anyone more informed about this?

PHP apps are popular

whartung — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 13:19:52 -0400

PHP apps are popular because PHP hosting is cheap, and most PHP apps are more than adequate for the tasks that they perform for a majority of users. Technologists may care about the underlying implementation, but Users can care less. They look at bang/$ ratios, and PHP wins this game hands down.

PHP is cheap to host because most shared hosting plans serve idle applications with little traffic, and PHP only consumes resources (modulo disk space) on the system when there is traffic, rather than Java which consumes resources based on the number of hosted applications. That's why all of the "cheap" Java plans have no memory, and why all of the "cheap" plans are nigh worthless. PHP costs the host disk space for each virtual host, Java costs the host memory. I'm sure you've all compared prices between RAM sticks and hard drives recently...

And there is nothing to be done about it. It is simply the nature of the beast. Shared Java hosting is unreliable (as mentioned in the original article), unless you go VPS which is expensive for a system of reasonable size (much less finding one well configured, like the 512MB host with no swap -- practically unusable). PHP hosting is effectively free today. ($5/month hosts with gazillion GB of hard drive space).

Simply, it's a cost of doing business with Java and needs to be factored in to your calculations regarding adoption of it or not.

It is something to think

sybrix — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 12:14:35 -0400

It is something to think about and I have and it's only substantiates the hosting problem noted in the article. There are fewer free java apps like drupal and joomla in part because of the hosting issue. If you wrote a drupal in java you'd surely need a dedicated server, because the app would mostly like be bloated with libraries that would easliy run through most of the heap space you get with most of these shared plans. PHP's success, in part ,can easily be attributed to its low cost of everything, tools and hosting. Java's lack of success on the hosting side is clear, and this definitely has had an effect on the the what's available for java.

I suspect the drupal decision was made in part because of cost. Javalobby appeared to be running on resin and some jive software, and probably some other stuff. But the forum software and resin weren't always free. I suspect JL was running on licensed $ software, not the free versions. I also suspect when considering to update the site, the cost of java development vs the cost of using something like drupal made the decision easy from a cost/time perspective.

If you're an aspiring web developer, and you want to build the next great webapp, even if all else was equal , you have to consider where the app can and is likely to to be deployed. To give yourself the best chance of success, you have to conclude that you have far more hosting options by choosing to not go with java.

I say all of that to simply agree, again, with the article's original point, hosting java web apps is harder and more expensive than it needs to be.

gent wrote:Many webmasters

sky_HALud — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 05:43:54 -0400

gent wrote:

Many webmasters discard java hosting and switch to php hosting because most of godd quality scripts written by PHP. javalobby is a good example. (running on drupal)

While I'm skeptic about the quality of most publicly available PHP scripts, fact is that JavaLobby and the whole DZone network do run on Drupal (which incidentally has an above average code quality). This is something to think about indeed.

Kattare.com has been hosting

smayzak@centerstance.com — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 03:56:49 -0400

Kattare.com has been hosting my Java applications with minimal effort on my part for 3 years! Check them out!

I'm using free java host

gent — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 01:03:54 -0400

I'm using free java host from http://www.jdy.net/ for testing my jsp application .

LunarPages is using resin as java container.

Many webmasters discard java hosting and switch to php hosting because most of godd quality scripts written by PHP. javalobby is a good example. (running on drupal)