Java Hosting for the 21st Century

I have been in the Java game for almost a decade and I have always been on the lookout for free or affordable java hosting. Back in the day when i was right out of school i found a lesser known site known as myjavaserver.com.

I was able to deploy my apps there in a test environment and see how it looked. I was even able to get a domain and forward traffic to myjavaserver.com and go live. Old school sites such as ginezproductions.org, edisupportforum.com, and blahblahblah.com were hosted there during my search for web glory days. Long since dead, those sites live on in my heart and mind.

Every once in a while I take a look for Java Hosting, yet it is never easy nor affordable. Like i’m gonna pay GoDaddy some $30 bucks a month for some stinkin’ JSPs only. F that! I want a Tomcat at my disposal. i want to throw some WARs up on the server and see the deployment logs in front of me. I want to taste the Servlet engine as it fires up and gets ready for some processing.

Finally, there seems to be an option out there. I was checking out some TechCrunch and they gave me a lead to a new Java Hosting environment. Jelastic, a U.S./Ukrainian/Russian provider of a cloud-based deployment platform for Java apps has unveiled a beta hosting service with two week trial period to check it out.

That’s good enough for me. I signed up and was brought immediately to a create environment page.

I chose a Tomcat 7, JDK 6, and grabbed a subdomain name. Easy as pie. Had to wait a few minutes while it created the server of my choice and Viola, I was now in a server view where I could deploy WARs and such.

FrozenGround just stuck in my head and I didn’t want to ponder on some test subdomain. Now I was able to deploy the test WAR package that was laid out for me.

I get to choose my context of course.

And then after a quick deployment, I get to open it in my browser.

Boom! The infamous Hello World is displayed. Nice!

TechCrunch filled me in on some other information regarding Jelastic.

“Jelastic, which competes with Heroku and Google App Engine, offers developers of Java applications a hosted platform based around standard software stacks, which it says helps avoid lock-ins and code changes. The company launched its public beta in October 2011, and since then has picked up over 15,000 unique users.

The product is available in the US through Servint, in Europe through dogado / HostEurope and Rusonyx in Russia.

Jelastic’s basic idea is to take a different approach to the hosting and deploying of Java apps: Normally, in order to host an application, one goes to, for example, Amazon Web Services, but configuring virtual machines manually takes time. This means developers have to install and maintain an operating system and application servers, instead of spending time on improving the core product.”

Seems pretty cool so I am going to get busy busting down some NetBeans and throwing together some Spring web apps to deploy to this bad boy. I am going to burn this mofo down the next 2 weeks and then check out how affordable a single Tomcat server is to maintain. My guess it will be alot less than GoDaddy’s JSP crock of a deal.