Inexpensive CFML hosting on servers in EU - coldfusion

I'd like to change shared-hosting from servers located in US to EU in order to decrease number of hops and latency.
Anyone having first hand experience with Coldfusion/Railo/OBD hosting providers from Europe?

I'd recommend to check out Centinated in Switzerland http://www.centinated.ch They are specialized in ColdFusion Hosting (shared and dedicated) and there is an offer for resellers, too.
If you prefer dedicated Servers and want to have your own ColdFusion or Railo install, Serverloft http://www.serverloft.eu/ always has very competitive offers. Servers are located in Frankfurt/Germany or St. Louis/USA.

And now something completely different, these guys are giving it for free, check them out http://www.hostmediauk.com/railo-hosting/

Don't know your meaning of "inexpensive", but following solution should match: Linode.com VPS in London + self-installed Railo (my choise is Ubuntu Server + Apache2 + Resin + Railo).

Related

Recommendations / Experience with Oracle APEX Hosting Providers

It seems I've outgrown my Oracle Free Tier Account. The quote I received to move into a paid tier was more than the non-profit I work for would be willing to pay, so I'm on the search for another APEX hosting provider.
I've looked at several, and two are at the top of my list: apexhostingservices.com and maxapex.com
Does anybody have experience with either of these companies, and would you recommend them?
Are there other hosting providers out there that you would recommend instead of these two?
Thank you!
I've been using Revion for a few months now. A variety of options, snappy, responsive service - I'm happy.

How can I set up a from home hosted website without buying a static IP?

So I know that somesites allow you to host web content for you, but they can start to charge an arm and a leg based on how much you want to update it, how much you have, and other things. Pretty much what I want to do is host a personal site for and about me. Essentially access things I need like RPG characters and references, cosplay stuff, gaming stuff, and all that ilk.
I'm going to be investing in a small box that is more or less always on and always online, unless I loose internet for some reason or have to restart a router etc, but I'm running into the issue of I need to buy a static IP which is around $60 a month. That's $60 I don't have or want to spend on a little pet project. And before you suggest or ask, no I don't want just a site like blogger or w/e to do it for me.
My question is, and I know that I've been told this before by a friend I just can't seem to remember what he said, is there a way this can be done without using a static IP address and hosting the site from home still?
Oh I should also add that I'd eventually like this to be something I can host my own RESTful webservice on for small little one off personal apps I'd use for myself too.
Actually you live in an elastic cloud century, there is no need to buy any static IP. You can try these things as follows.
Amazon Web Service. You can get 1 year free trial, EC2 is really wonderful to host whatever you want.
Openshift. You can freely create 3 gears to host your application. The environment is very easy to configure. If you want
to deploy symphony, laravel and some other frameworks, openshift
should be the best choice.
Free web service.
You could use a Dynamic DNS service. You create an account (it often costs money, but there are some plans where it's free if you log in every month), and then install a piece of software on a computer/connect it to your router, and you get a subdomain like network63.example.com, which you can have a CNAME in your Domain's dns records to. Then whenever your IP changes, the software detects it and sends a request to their servers to update the record. I'm actually considering starting one myself. These are generally a lot cheaper than getting another IP address.
I host a few things from home (A gitea server and an ownCloud server), and I haven't needed this as although I don't have a static IP, it doesn't change very often, and it's easy enough to update the record after my router restarts or there is an outage (very rare), although this probably varies by ISP.

Django website accessible to others just for testing

Right now the website is running locally and I'm still working on it.
While doing this I also have to make it visible to a specific group of users as I need their feedback in order to add/change features, etc.
I've tried to find a free web hosting without any luck (see dependencies).
I was thinking to create a VPN but then I will have to use my PC as a host for a virtual machine which is by far not what I'm looking for.
Therefore, my questions are:
1. Which is the best way to achieve this (website visibility for TESTING) fast and easy?
2. If a dedicated web host is the best solution, please point me to an easy-to-use and cheap one. What I've tried so far: elastichosts, alwasydata, stackable, 1FreeHosting and probably others I don't remember right now. For a reason or another I couldn't use none of the above.
Another aspect to be considered: I want this only for simple testing and I don't need a lot of server resources. Also the traffic will be very low as there are only 5 testers. That's why I wouldn't pay too much for it. I will probably need this temporary web hosting for 2-3 months.
Dependencies:
- as the website uses mezzanine, for the moment I only need mezzanine's dependencies.
Thanks in advance!
You can always just setup port forwarding on your router. This would allow your testers direct access to your app. Though this might give your PC more exposure than you want.
Heroku has a free tier.
In your non free options, an instance at linode costs $20/month, but requires some setup. Rackspace has similar options in their cloud servers line. Both are no contract servers.
My blogpost covers gracefully deploying a Mezzanine site. The monthly hosting cost is nothing compared to the cost of a slow, painful deployment process.
An EC2 micro-instance right now costs as little as ~US$3.50/month. I create and destroy staging servers on EC2 servers for testing and sharing with others.

AWS and Railo setup

I wondered if anyone can point me in the right direction in regards to installing Railo on AWS.
In my spare time I've put together a website to sell illustrations, but due to cost I'm unable to keep on spending money hosting it on a dedicate CF server with almost zero budget for marketing. I've been toying with the idea of setting up an account with Amazon and installing Railo.
Over the past few months I've had different advice, such as get a S3 account to host the images and an EC2 account for Railo for the website and DB with SSL, or just have S3 account where I will be able to host Railo and have my images on the same server. I'm not sure what is best and I was wondering if you can advise what you think a good solution would be.
I've read a few blogs some with good details on setups but they seem to be over a year+ old, so I'm not sure if they are valid solution any more. It's very much over my head, as I'm a developer, but I'm very eager to learn new things especially about the cloud service as it's not a common area to get involved in when working for companies. In the past I used to tag a long to server rooms and understand the infrastructure but now everything is done remotely and it's not so easy to get involved.
Any basic advice/advanced advice from your experiences of what I should follow and if you know of any good resources would be very much appreciated.
Should I get an S3 and EC2 AWS setup or will one of them do (will need DB connectivity)?
Load balancing two EC2 instances will that be hard to configure, I will need to web servers.
I just posted this very topic a few weeks ago. Should still be more than up to date:
http://blog.nictunney.com/2012/03/railo-tomcat-and-apache-on-amazon-ec2.html
HTH

Migrate hosted LAMP site to AWS

Is there an easy way to migrate a hosted LAMP site to Amazon Web Services? I have hobby sites and sites for family members where we're spending far too much per month compared to what we would be paying on AWS.
Typical el cheapo example of what I'd like to move over to AWS:
GoDaddy domain
site hosted at 1&1 or MochaHost
a handful of PHP files within a certain directory structure
a small MySQL database
.htaccess file for URL rewriting and the like
The tutorials I've found online necessitate PuTTY, Linux commands, etc. While these aren't the most cumbersome hurdles imaginable, it seems overly complicated. What's the easiest way to do this?
The ideal solution would be something like what you do to set up a web host: point GoDaddy to it, upload files, import database, done. (Bonus points for phpMyAdmin being already installed but certainly not necessary.)
It would seem the amazon AWS marketplace has now got a solution for your problem :
https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B0078UIFF2/ref=gtw_msl_title/182-2227858-3810327?ie=UTF8&pf_rd_r=1RMV12H8SJEKSDPC569Y&pf_rd_m=A33KC2ESLMUT5Y&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_i=awsmp-gateway-1&pf_rd_p=1362852262&pf_rd_s=right-3
Or from their own site
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/lampstack
A full LAMP stack including PHPMyAdmin with no setup required.
As for your site and database migration itself (which should require no more than file copies and a database backup/restore) the only way to make this less cumbersome is to have someone else do it for you...
Dinah,
As a Web Development company I've experienced an unreal number of hosting companies. I've also been very closely involved with investigating cloud hosting solutions for sites in the LAMP and Windows stacks.
You've quoted GoDaddy, 1And1 and Mochahost for micro-sized Linux sites so I'm guessing you're using a benchmark of $2 - $4 per month, per site. It sounds like you have a "few" sites (5ish?) and need at least one database.
I've yet to see any tool that will move more than the most basic (i.e. file only, no db) websites into Cloud hosting. As most people are suggesting, there isn't much you can do to avoid the initial environment setup. (You should factor your time in too. If you spend 10 hours doing this, you could bill clients 10 x $hourly-rate and have just bought the hosting for your friends and family.)
When you look at AWS (or anyone) remember these things:
Compute cycles is only where it starts. When you buy hosting from traditional ISPs they are selling you cycles, disk space AND database hosting. Their default levels for allowed cycles, database size and traffic is also typically much higher before you are stopped or charged for "overage", or over-usage.
Factor in the cost of your 1 database, and consider how likely it will be that you need more. The database hosting charges can increase Cloud costs very quickly.
While you are likely going to need few CCs (compute cycles) for your basic sites, the free tier hosting maximums are still pretty low. Anticipate breaking past the free hosting and being charged monthly.
Disk space it also billed. Factor in your costs of CCs, DB and HDD by using their pricing estimator: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html
If your friends and family want to have access to the system they won't get it unless you use a hosting company that allows "white labeling" and provides a way to split your main account into smaller mini-hosting accounts. They can even be setup to give self-admin and direct billing options if you went with a host like www.rackspace.com. The problem is you don't sound like you want to bill anyone and their minimum account is likely way too big for your needs.
Remember that GoDaddy (and others) frequently give away a year of hosting with even simple domain registrations. Before I got my own servers I used to take HUGE advantage of these. I've probably been given like 40+ free hosting accounts, etc. in my lifetime as a client. (I still register a ton of domain through them. I also resell their hosting.)
If you aren't already, consider the use of CMS systems that support portaling (one instance, many websites under different domains). While I personally prefer DotNetNuke I'm sure that one of its LAMP stack competitors can do the same for you. This will keep you using only one database and simplify your needs further.
I hope this helps you make a well educated choice. I think it'll be a fine-line between benefits and costs. Only knowing the exact size of every site, every database and the typical traffic would allow this to be determined in advance. Database count and traffic will be your main "enemies". Optimize files to reduce disk-space needs AND your traffic levels in terms of data transferred.
Best of luck.
Actually it depends upon your server architecture, whether you want to migrate whole of your LAMP stack to Amazon EC2.
Or use different Amazon web services for different server components like Amazon S3 for storage and Amazon RDS for mysql database and so.
In case if you are going with LAMP on EC2: This tutorial will atleast give you a head up.
Anyways you still have to go with essential steps of setting up the AMI and installing LAMP through SSH.