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Cheap Grails hosting

We can use Amazon EC2 micro instance (~615mb RAM) to run grails application with Tomcat and Mysql. If you need higher JVM memory, we can try to keep the memory footprint low by using memcached or ehcache.
The price is nearly $5/month if you commit for a one year contract. Since November this year, this service is offered for free for the first year for new customers.
If your server server load is higher, with more number of visitors/hits, your website must be in revenue generation mode and I'm sure it will pay for itself for additional server resources.

Alternatively, you can run your Grails Application on Google AppEngine. There may be few constraints in terms using some of your favorite plugins. If you careful build the application keeping the constraints in mind, you may get away with almost free webhosting. ($0/month - provided usage is within the boundaries defined by GAE platform)

Both Amazon and GAE, have billing mechanisms based on the bandwidth, data storage and few add-on services. If the billing is compared with similar PHP based websites running on $5/month webhosting servers, the Grails apps will not cost us more.

Note that high volume PHP sites also require more computing resources and the comparative cost of running PHP and GRAILS applications will be identical.

So far, PHP websites enjoyed higher adoption because of
1) Low cost hosting
2) Availability of robust CMS frameworks Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress.
3) Easy deployment

Now that cost advantage of PHP is no more with the availability of Google App Engine and Amazon EC2 (micro) instances Java/Grails based web-applications are ready for prime time.

PHP community is also not far behind in innovation and have come up with GRAILS/RAILS killer with similar frameworks like CodeIgnitor. The higher developer productivity we gain by using GRAILS can also be accomplished with CodeIgnitor.

Amazon hosting services(EC2 - micro instance) can also be used for web applications based on JSP, Servlets, Struts, and scores of other web frameworks that are available today. Custom TCP/IP applications and other enterprise applications can also leverage these servers for cheap hosting.

Google App Engine, GAE, on the other hand have certain limitations and needs to carefully evaluated before adopting. However, it is good choice for testing your "web based business idea" with out having to worry about the
- infrastructure cost
- configuration for high availability and scalability.
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  1. AnonymousDecember 12, 2011 at 3:15 AM

    This is first time i am reading about this concept and great read for me.web hosting provider

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousSeptember 5, 2012 at 11:41 AM

    excellent post, thank you!

    ReplyDelete

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