Hosting Java Web Applications: Why Is It Still So Hard?

Great topic, and I've gone through everything you mentioned, especially w/godaddy and settled on a dedicated server at cari.net.

 
low cost, quality  java hosting is long over due.

Very good topic ! :)

I'm one of those who had serious problems with shared hosting !!!!

My hosting company previously used Tomcat 5.x and then 6.x now.

I've been running simple java-jsp applications on my host(i.e. jsp forum etc.).

Then one day I deployed a little much more complex application that I developed using Myfaces and Hibernate.

It was a total mass!!!  It took 2 weeks of work to fix application based and hosting based problem too see index(!).As I was trying to fix those my only communication way was e-mail:(

I remember one of those problems was encoding.

In my hibernatesession class my code was setting encoding to a different one from hosting jvm's default encoding so it caused all web application deployed on that machine to crash!!

Not happy with my shared hosting(slow) and I think private hosting prices are high for individuals.

MVM does not stand for multi-threaded virtual machine.

I've also not heard anything stating that MVM support will be in Java 6 Update 10.  Can you please give a specific citation  to this effect?

Hmm, I've never seen the words "Enterprise" and "phpBB" in one sentence, interesting :)

A catchy title and it seems you're trying to prove something very hard:

You're trying to prove that Java sucks because you can't run phpBB in it on a 256MB server. Everyone knows that there's not many things that run properly on a shared hosting apart from PHP (and that includes Python/Ruby/Smalltalk/Lisp or anything that is not mod_php). You didn't do a good job at comparing the VPS's - currently you can easily buy 1GB/2GB VPS for 30EUR/50EUR per month. I'm sorry but 50 EUR is far from being "Enterprise" :)

The title of this post should be:

" Why PHP is great for cheap, hared hosting of discussion boards"

hosiawak, what I was trying to see was - for small-to-medium Java applications that need to run on a tight budget, are there any convenient hosting options? The "enterprise" world was certainly not in my views - surely they have big bad servers of their own :-) And well, I am a Java fan and our company translates PHP to Java and not the opposite.

Please note that the price figures I mentioned where in USD. These days a Euro is 1.56 USD, so the figures that you are talking about are much higher in USD than they look.

Did you also look at other phpBB ports to java? There a quite a few of them and nBB2 is the result of an automated migration. I would expect it to have quite poor performance compared to a 'real' java implementation.

Look at jforum.net for instance.

Marc

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) 

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.

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.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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).

GFv3 can only take the problem so far. There are fundamental issues with the underlying JVM.

The primary issue isolation of applications within the shared system. It's is far to easy for a hostile application to harm the server. By hostile I mean simply either an intentional attack via malicious code, or an unintentional attack via bad code. That's why shared hosting can be unreliable if other users needs to restart the server.

Now in theory, the containers have SOME control over this, but I don't know of any that are written to handle the shared hosting environment well. For example, if the container catches an OOM exception from an application, perhaps it can force a reload of that application with the hopes that it will free up some memory. But, that's not really fair being as the app that throws the OOM error isn't necessarily the app that CAUSED the OOM error, and in truth, THAT's the app you want to reload.

Also Java apps are set up to be "long running" "in memory" applications. It's routine for many applications to perform slow start up (perhaps pre-loading and caching a lot of data) to ready themselves to better handle the requests when they do come in. Put that application in to an environment where the application itself may be continually loaded and reloaded, and you end up with what appears to be a badly performing application.

But others are endemic to the JVM. For example, there's no safe way to kill a thread in the JVM. So, you can't even have a container that has watchdog thread running looking for runaway threads, so it can kill them off. Also, since the memory system is opaque to Java, you can't impose memory limits on individual threads. And even if you could, they'd be difficult to track. For example, how much of a threads memory is being used by shared resources within the container, vs the thread itself. (You can see this problem today on Unix systems. When using shared memory, it can be very difficult to find out exactly how much memory an individual process is using.)

Java, also, has historically had a poor track record of reclaiming space from Classes. The dreaded PermGen errors folks get from constantly reloading JSPs and what not.

The JVM can be changed to better accommodate this task, even without the MVM. They can make a "smarter", more "container friendly"JVM to better support the problem. Memory accounting would still be a problem though I think. (I don't know how much flexibility the JVM leaves the implementor as to the underlying primitive object layout.)

Unix as an underlying OS handles this problem wielding it's course process model. Processes have their own costs, but they're very safe form an OS point of view. This coarse process model is what make PHP work so well.

I find it interesting that nobody's compared Java and PHP hosting with .NET hosting.

I'm not a shill for Microsoft, hear me out.

.NET hosting prices are generally on par with LAMP hosting, whereas, as noted in the article, realistic Java hosting is more than double the monthly cost. Big organizations with deep pockets buying expensive, enterprisy-smelling servers can sustain the Java platform only so long. Managers who are conscious of economic efficiency don't care about brand name or platform loyalty, and lightweight, loosely-coupled simple services are the wave of the future.

The Java community really has to solve the hosting problem if it wants to move forward in the server-side space. It doesn't matter how cool JRuby on Rails is for straight-to-the-point agile development if Joe Startup can't affordably host the Next Big Thing written in it. They'll do a cool mashup in Drupal, Joomla or DotNetNuke and get it on the street for ten buxamonth instead.

Parting rhetorical question: If Java is so great running on a fifty-dollar cell phone, why can't it run cost-effectively on a server?

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.