Jelastic - Holy Grail of Java Hosting? (user review) | Hacker News Reader

Jelastic - Holy Grail of Java Hosting? (user review)

blog.jelastic.com

23 pointsjjohns20 comments

If it doesn't have a free tinkerer level pricing tier, I'm not interested.

This is what App Engine and Heroku have going for them.

Agreed. If it costs money to learn how to use a new PaaS, adoption will most likely suffer.

Part of what makes it so cool is that there is literally no learning curve. It's a pretty straightforward UI. We made that part of our goal when developing that platform: not having to relearn stuff to just deploy your app, like Amazon or Google.

Totally agreed, that's why ActiveState's Stackato (which also supports Java) has a free micro cloud. The Micro Cloud is a stand-alone instance of the Stackato system running in a single VM. This lets you push your apps to an environment that is functionally identical to a full PaaS cluster. ActiveState Stackato gives you 3 ways to test your application (1) on a Stackato Micro Cloud, (2) with an Amazon EC2 AMI or (3) on their Private Stackato Sandbox Service. check it out at http://activestate.com/cloud

As of now, while in Beta, it's totally free--and has been for about 5mo. That said, we are working on getting a free tier. Doing free as a startup when you have to have infrastructure on the backend is a little difficult.

Right now, it is free. You should give it a try. Within about 5min you will know if you like it or not.

Pricing is not clear. From an official blog post, that's ~ 14 $ / month / cloudlet (128 MB RAM; 200MHz CPU equiv). But what about the databases ?

Pleaase give us a cost calculator!

Sorry that wasn't clear. The way it works is pricing is the same for database and app servers, i.e. per cloudlet. HDD is free for the first 1GB. After that, there will be a monthly fee for storage that we have yet to announce. (it will be in line with what storage is currently running in the market)

Let's do some basic math.

Let's say that I rent two redundant dedicated servers that : - are each used at about 80% - are each equivalent of about 100 cloudlets - cost each $ 60 / month

If I want to switch to Jelastic, that's 14 x 100 x 2 x 0.8 = $ 2240 per month (gross simplification), against 2 x 80 = $ 160 per month + maintenance.

So if maintenance is < 2k€ for me, that's a no deal. In US a freelance sysadmin will cost more (?), but in my country, no. Too bad :)

I think you are looking at this from the wrong perspective. The idea is that you only pay for what you use. 2 dedicated servers means you always pay for the whole thing, plus you have to be the sys admin and a few other things. Jelastic eliminates that layer and it only charges you for what you actually use. I doubt you need to dedicated servers full time to run an app. The idea behind automated scaling is that you eliminate the costs associated with hosting. I come from a hosting background and this is a HUGE cost saving measure. Even if you get a sys admin for super cheap (Eastern EU or a BRIC country), it would still be cheaper to use Jelastic. All that said, another issue with mirrored, dedicated servers would be the issue of one going down: with Jelastic you won't have that issue.

Hmm, I can't seem to find pricing at all on the main site, at least not in a way that I can make sense of. There does seem to be something linked off a blog post buried in another blog post. That bugs me.

At the end of this month, we will have the pricing on the site. Our blog post on pricing was about us launching commercially at the end of this month. At that time, we will publish pricing on our page.

Makes sense, though it would be nice to have at least a place holder on the main site stating that pricing is yet to be determined. I very nearly ignored jelastic entirely as it looked like I had to signup to get pricing information.

Thanks for the idea. I'll see if we can't do that today or tomorrow.

http://jelastic.com/team? Is this a Russian company?

We are something of an international company. We have offices in the US and Ukraine. Our funding comes from Runa Capital, which is Russian. I am based in Houston, TX. :)

Thanks for answering my question - I'd suggest you to put more information on jelastic.com, for example, for US customers, do you have your fully owned data center in US? or you are building on top of other providers (AWS, Rackspace, Linode etc etc)? if so, how is the quality of service and support of your provider? Where is your engineer located? You might also want to consider to provide a 800 phone number. As far as software stack is concerned, I suggest you to add messaging support for example ActiveMq or RabbitMq - it is essential for "big" systems, which are more likely be your source of revenue.

To your first question: we actually don't own datacenters. We partner with reputable hosters within each country that we go into so that there is already a well known and established company with great infrastructure in place. So, for example, if you US Jelastic in the US, your actual data would be on the Jelastic platform with Servint (our US partner). All of our partners have incredible uptime (Servint has something like 7 9's after their 99.9% uptime) and service.

As far as engineers and such, we are on both sides of the globe, US and Eastern EU, so that we can cover all times zones well.

Not sure about adding a support phone number. I've always had bad experiences when providing that as another option for support, especially in today's hyper connect world. We find that most our users (>12k) prefer the forums, support tickets and Twitter and Facebook.

I do like your idea for a messaging system. I've actually been considering Olarq. I'll most definitely make sure that we talk about this. :)

Thanks for the suggestions!

Their documentation looks a lot like Heroku Dev Center. Anyone know if this is an open source wiki?

We have been using Tender for it, but are most likely going to change because it does not have the functionality that we need.

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