Marc Palmer

I am currently developing a web application and I’m researching the hosting options for it. My gut feeling – resulting from having zero startup cash and the self-deluding belief that the service will take off – is that a cloud based solution is the way to go.

So what are the options for Grails application cloud hosting? Currently I have found the following three options (other than rolling your own direct to Amazon EC2). I will be as brief as possible. Please do contact me with details of other services and/or corrections to this info.

• Mor.ph AppSpace / AppCloud (beta)
  Based on EC2? AppCloud beta YES, AppSpace not sure. Web-based control panel? YES. Pricing published? YES. Grails plugin? YES (Google code one was broken so I wrote a new one). Have I tried the service? YES. Was it a good experience: YES although currently we have some session/class load error problems support are still investigating.
• Stax
  Based on EC2? YES. Web-based control panel? YES. Pricing published? NO. Grails plugin? NO. Have I tried the service? NO. Was it a good experience: N/A. Am talking with Spike Washburn about putting together a Grails plugin with them, and will probably try the service soon with their SDK, although it is unclear whether it will be pitched with a suitable level of support for commercial services (rather than test / prototyping / Java community hosting)
• Cloudtools / Cloud Foundry
  Based on EC2? YES. Web-based control panel? NO. Pricing published? EC2 pricing for self administered with Cloudtools. Cloud Foundry management costs not published yet. Grails plugin? YES, but not in Grails pl. Have I tried the service? NO. Was it a good experience: N/A. Am talking with Spike Washburn from Stax about putting together a Grails plugin with them, and will try the service soon, although it is unclear whether it will be pitched with a suitable level of support for commercial services (rather than test / prototyping / Java community hosting)

So there are a few options out there at the moment. Currently – my class loading problems aside – Mor.ph is the easiest to get running, its so easy it is ridiculous. However at the moment they don’t seem to have realtime monitoring of the servers which Stax seems to have, and performance on AppSpace free test setup seemed poor (worse than my MacBook, with a single user). The Mor.ph AppCloud beta looks like it could be better, but the currently published pricing seems very high with a minimum of $1500 per month for 5 virtual boxes.

Cloudtools looks interesting, but I’m personally looking for something managed / with a web based UI. I also have concerns about the lack of information available about database performance generally with this kind of hosting. Providers still need to refine the information they provide and increase the level of detail if they want to attract commercial services. Hosting is a crucial decision to make, and if you make it without enough information if you are successful, it could kill your business if you hit a block you didn’t realise existed.

I’m sure the marketplace will expand and mature quite quickly now, but the choices are far from clear at the moment if you want a low-hassle commercial deployment.