A Java Developer S Guide To Web Hosting

A Java Developer's Guide To Web Hosting

by: David Heffelfinger

You make a living writing enterprise java applications, and you

would like to work on your own projects for fun or profit, you

would like to create your own web site or you would like to have a

place to host your open source project. You look around for

hosting providers, and all you see is PHP and PERL support, with

very few hosting companies supporting Java, what to do?

Although the number of hosting companies supporting Java is

increasing, support varies from nearly non-existent to companies

that are deeply committed to their Java support.

There are three types of hosting plans available:

? Shared hosting

? Virtual Private Server hosting

? Dedicated Server hosting.

With a shared hosting plans, several web sites are hosted on the

same server, sharing the server's resources and using the same IP

address. Virtual Private Server (VPS) plans consist of a server that

is split into multiple virtual servers, each virtual server has it's

own IP address, some companies call these types of plans Virtual

Dedicated Servers. Dedicated servers are the most expensive type

of plan, each dedicated server customer gets their own physical

server, nice to have, but prohibitively expensive for personal web

sites and small operations.

At Ensode.net, we recommend that you find a hosting company that

provides Virtual Private Server (VPS) support (some hosting

companies call it Virtual Dedicated Server), since they provide a

nice balance between price and control. A VPS server is like

having your own server, usually with root access, which gives you

the freedom to install any application you might need, including

version control systems like Subversion or CVS, WebDAV, or

anything else you might need. With a VPS plan you will most likely

get your own IP address, and your server will be not only your

web server, but also your mail and database server.

VPS hosting plans tend to be somewhat more expensive than

shared hosting plans, but it is our belief that they are worth the

extra cost since they provide much more control and flexibility. If

you are a Java developer, chances are you are used to "getting your

hands dirty", and working on a server using good old Unix

commands. Shared hosting plans tend to have "user friendly"

(dumbed down?) interfaces, which might simplify administration,

but can also severely limit what you are able to do, for example,

let's say a shared hosting company gives you 300 megabytes of

disk space to host your web site, and an additional 300 megabytes

for your email, if your web site takes 5 megabytes of space, but

your email server is getting full, there is no way to allocate more

space to store emails and reduce the allocation of web space. In

addition to leaving you unable to reallocate resources as needed,

you can also forget about installing any applications on your

server. Another disadvantage of shared hosting plans is that an IP

address is shared among several customers, which could have

potential problems. For example, if one of the customers uses their

mail server for bulk emailing, the IP address of that mail server

may be banned from several systems, in a shared hosting plan

environment, this would affect all the customers using the same

server.

With few exceptions, shared hosting plans that support Java do so

through a shared JVM, which means that you have no way of

starting or stopping the JVM, and the same JVM is used to run the

Java applications of all the hosting company's clients on the server.

With a VPS plan, since you have access to your own (virtual)

server, it is a given that you get full control over the JVM.

You can use your favorite search engine to find companies that

offer VPS plans. Good luck and may your site become immensely

popular.

About The Author

David Heffelfinger is a Software Engineer with over 10 years of

experience. He is the editor in chief of Ensode.net a technology

website providing articles about Java, Linux and other

technology topics. He can be reachd via email at

dheffelfinger@ensode.net.