My choices
- application hosting - where the hoster provides a running web server and database for me to install my app
- vps (virtual private server) - where the hoster provides a virtual machine with a base OS and I install any other apps on it that I want to use. There is a great deal of variability in "managed" VPS's and unmanaged VPS's.
- dedicated server - this would be overkill.
My requirements
Website requirements: The website is around 10 pages and while we have ideas for a shopping cart and a need for her to add content herself for the next 6-12 months a static site is all that is needed while she builds other parts of the business.
Developer/admin'ing constraints: I'm primarily a Java programmer with a little linux sysadmin experience. But at the same time I want the option to use other languages in the future (I'm thinking ruby but potentially a js server as well).
Budget constraints: for the first 6-12 months we want to go "budget" until the business has proven itself and until it's demonstrated a need for a beefier website. A brief survey showed that the cheapest application hosters were $5-$10/month.
Considering application hosting
There are providers that give me a Java web server (with tomcat the most frequent choice), there are providers that give me rails. Most providers have php, perl, maybe python as well. They all have mysql and sometimes postgresql available.
There are fewer providers that host both a Java web server and rails. I noticed a jump in costs as well, usually $10 or more a month.
So I tried to find reviews of these various companies. Finding a large enough sample set of reviews to get an overview was difficult. For example, a single flaming review of how a hosting company wronged the reviewer holds little water. The reviewer usually ends up sounding impatient, entitled, and ignorant. At the same time a single positive review might mean the poster just got lucky and didn't need much support or bandwidth.
The only clear thing I noticed was that no Java provider was generating more positive than negative reviews. In this case I'm concluding "budget" means "poor performance/support".
Considering VPS
Originally I didn't wanted a VPS. I thought I was happy to let someone else sysadmin my server and the application server. But given the poor reviews of Java hosting companies I started to look a little more earnestly at VPS's. Here again pricing varies wildly and widely, but for now I wanted a bare bones system that is reliable and that let's me play on a single server. No need for enterprise-quality control panels for my VM, for example.
I found a couple important websites.
WebHosting Talk is very active. Many people have experience with many hosters and there are many, many reviews to shift through. Your mileage will vary with the competency of the poster.
Low End Box is great. The dude lists a couple VPS deals every day. Lots of people try out the VPS hosts and provide comments. On top of that there's a "Top Voted Provider in Q1" list. Many, many of the providers are active in the comments section so you get a pretty quick sense of which are dependable and experienced.
After reading a bit I chose http://buyvm.net/. I admit that I'm hoping the masses knew what they were talking about when they voted it to the top.
A word of warning: buyvm has amazingly low prices for low-end VPS's BUT when I clicked on them I was taken to another website (directspace.com) that told me they were out of stock. I ended up choosing the third-lowest option, at $10/month for the following:
- Memory: 2 GB
- Burst: 2 GB
- Disk Space: 40 GB
- Bandwidth: 3 TB
- OS: CentOS 32-bit
Even for an unmanaged VPS this is pretty good.
Thoughts
Another word of warning: I went back to buyvm.com while writing this post and the page had changed. Similar pricing but not identical. I clicked on one of the solutions and was taken to yet another new website where none of the options were in stock.
But I read many posts on Low End Box website sysadmin for buyvm - so why does it seem like buyvm is just front that re-directs to other companies? There's probably a marketing relationship between the two with buyvm providing the VPS services in bulk and the other companies are resellers, but I haven't figured it out yet. I will update this post when I do.
Payment, Initial Login and Conclusion
Even at $10/month I got a discount and paid $26 for 3 months. A few seconds after posting payment via paypal I received an email from DirectSpace with login information. I logged into my "control panel" for my VM, checked it out. Got the IP address and ssh'd directly into that. No setup time! Whereas many other providers can take a while, even days if they're running out of IP's, to provide a running VM.
More on my initial setup and configuration in another post.
They are provide a great java web server and you giving the information about java server..good explain..i get some new idea your post..website hosting service provider
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