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Comment by tomjen2 | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, they require a host with J2EE, since it is written using JSP.

It doesn't matter if you have a company, but for a hobby project that kind of kills it.

Why ? Tomcat costs just as much as apache/php/python/perl costs.

You obviously haven't run JIRA and Confluence before. They take up a lot of memory and resources, certainly more than a low end VPS can handle.

Well yes, but I have been unable to find a host for tomcat the way you could find a host for, say php.

Quite understandable for the market they operate in, but a bit unfortunate for the hobby projects that might benefit from them.

A low-end Linode box is only $20/month and has plenty of capacity for Tomcat and company.

Alternatively, you Rackspace have a 256mb VM for $11/month, though you have to add bandwidth ontop of that.

slicehost:

http://www.slicehost.com/

$20 / month, full root access. Install tomcat and off you go.

That's cheaper than most bad habits ;)

a tomcat web app with database will choke and die on 256megs of ram

Depends on the number of users. If it is a hobbysite then I'm expecting that you have very little traffic (on the order of a few hundred uniques per day). If you go above that slap some google ads on it, reinvest what you make with those in your server and you'll be doing just fine. By the time you reach $80 / month (and that's only $2.75 / day) you can afford to lease a dedicated server, with as much ram as you care to buy, that's a one time expense.

And you'll still be out only what little bit there is between whatever you make and whatever it costs to get a dedicated server even if you decide to get one from day one.

Hobbies cost money.

edit: hey downmodders, how is your tomcat instance running ? Mine is doing ok:

21747 ? Sl 94:33 /usr/java/default/bin/java -Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoaderLogManager -Djava.util.logging.config.file=/usr/local/tomcat/conf/logging.properties -Djava.endorsed.dirs=/usr/local/tomcat/endorsed -classpath :/usr/local/tomcat/bin/bootstrap.jar -Dcatalina.base=/usr/local/tomcat -Dcatalina.home=/usr/local/tomcat -Djava.io.tmpdir=/usr/local/tomcat/temp org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap start

J2EE can't possibly run well on the amount of RAM slicehost demands.

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