Web Hosting Services

[Rpasma]

As many of you know I am just trying to get off the ground with web application development. So far gravity has been winning but the struggle continues. One of the items I am dealing besides selecting the best development platform is to decide what the best web hosting service would be. So far I have not seen any discussion on this board about this topic. It this is because it is so obvious no discussion is needed that is fine, as long as someone takes a moment to tell me the obvious.

The three issues with a web hosting service would be speed, reliability and cost. The order of importance of these items would vary from one person to the next. As I am just doing my best to get the wheels turning cost is the biggest factor, the other stuff I will worry about later.

I am leaning towards In.de with a Java compiler. Google’s App Engine would seem to serve my needs quite well.


https://developers.google.com/appengine/


If you want documentation and videos about Web hosting services, you will not have enough time to look at what Google has provided. I suspect even if you are using another Web hosting service this might be a good place to go for information.  For someone learning such as me having a free service even with the limitations it has, is great. For many small applications the quota for free service might be enough to get the job done. The free quota limitations can be found at the link below.


https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas

It would be useful if someone could provide a brief discussion about the various web hosting services available for different platforms and if cost or other factors might influence ones decision on what development platform to choose. Things I have not mentioned here about web hosting services would be great. After spending more than an hour on Google’s Web hosting pages, my mind started to spin, my head started to hurt and I threw up my hands saying this is just too much. Someone that has been dealing with this needs to step in here. Any comments would be greatly appreciated.
 
All the Best,
Rich

[Rpasma]

Thank you for all the comments. I have been looking at Web hosting services and am surprised at how inexpensive they are. The learning tools I will be going with will be In.de with the Java compiler and the Google’s App Engine mentioned earlier. Since the Google App Engine supports both Java and MySQL it should work, or I will learn something without it costing anything. The free limits for Google’s App Engine include 1Gb of code and data. The bandwidth limitations for my first  apps are not going to be a problem.

Rich

[Rpasma]

Marcel,
Your observation about the documentation of Google’s features being hard to understand matches my experience as well. I am hoping there is not going to be much setup and maintenance on the Google side of the Apps I develop.

Dave,
Google App Engine is not a pay per minute but free up to certain quotes. You are limited to 10 websites, 50,000 reads, 50,000 writes and 657,000 API channel calls per day. Nothing I can see doing in the near future is going to hit those limits. There may be other limitation I am not aware.

I will give it a shot and let people here know how it works out.

Rich

[Rpasma]

Using Google’s App Engine as a server is not as free as I suspected earlier. Google has two areas for storing data, its Data Store and its SQL Cloud. The free 1Gb of storage you get from the Data Store does not support any relational data base structure. The charge for a relational database in the SQL Cloud is very small if you have limited use. However if you read the fine print located elsewhere, you will find there is a minimum $2.15 weekly charge.

One of the assumptions I had made was, Google being very cutting edge with networking and server technology, along with its huge resources would be alongside or ahead of others with web hosting services. Boy was I wrong. It makes me wonder where they are headed. You can bet they are two steps ahead of others, or maybe just not caring about small developers with their bigger plans.

Amazon does not appear to be geared toward the small market with Web hosting either. Only pay for what you use seems to be the theme I have seen both Google and Amazon promote. Cloud services for consumers and Web hosting for the big boys.

All the Best,
Rich

[factotum]

If you are going to deploy java solutions you need a provider that offers a java server such as TOMCAT - I believe...
If I am right, linux providers such as the one Dave recommends may not provide this feature. I tried to find it on there but no success. If deploying in.de for .net then linux providers are obviously of no use.
Here is an example of a java server provider: http://www.dailyrazor.com/java-jsp-hosting/private-tomcat-hosting/

[Rpasma]

Paul,

Thank you a bunch for your comments they were very helpful. Two hours of searching on the web for a better Java capable web hosting provider than you recommended in your last post was unable to turn up anything better. It is quite a marketing zoo one has to go through to evaluate this.

Mochahost provided much better pricing and features, however the huge number of negative reviews gave credence to many of the complaints being made. This is an excellent example of a company with marketing skills running ahead of their technical ones and caring more about perceived profit than its customers. Alpha in my opinion has never or probably never would use this type of deception. 

As far as running ahead of one’s skills I have done that here once again. My last post put Amazon in the same boat as Google regarding its Web hosting services. Boy was I wrong, again! If you are in the learning phase of dealing with the web, Amazon provides a free service for learning with excellent resources.

It is worth noting Amazon with its EC2 one year free service offer does provide Tomcat and MySQL. If you have and interest do a web search on the terms:  Amazon, Tomcat, MySQL. 

All the Best,
Rich

[factotum]

Glad I could be of some help Rich. I have often thought about Java based development solutions such as those generated by Wavemaker but always shied away because of the negative observations I have seen over recent months about big holes in the security of java sites.
I will be interested to hear the feedback from those of you that take that route and how complex or straightforward java server administration is...

[factotum]

John, my take on cloud is as follows: It is essentially smoke and mirrors. I can't remember his name but one of the founding fathers of the open source movement has ridiculed it openly as another way of reinventing revenue opportunities for the big players like MS, Oracle, Amazon, Google, et al...
However, it is not going to go away, simply because these guys can hype the market over and over again, this is because they have fat wallets and then some...  But, I believe it will become more transparent cost-wise as more and more organisations vie for your business.
You are of course right about dedicated server and VPS solutions effectively being the same thing as the cloud. Cloud providers would argue that up time and speed are their aces in the pack, whereas I would counter that I have never experienced any downtime on my dedicated server and speed issues are probably more to do with fluctuations in your broadband connection. Also, I have noticed that the costs for these alternative services have significantly reduced since the advent of the cloud.
My main problem with the cloud is metered usage, how do you the user monitor what is really going on? You hear horror stories about massive mobile phone bills being racked for no apparent reason, imagine the same scenario with metered cloud usage...
I lost on the horses today, not much but enough to annoy me, that's probably why I'm a bit crabby... Hey Ho