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What are the best hosting services for Java web apps?

5

Options
Considered

23

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Recs.

Sep 19, 2017

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

5 Options Considered

Best hosting services for Java web apps	Price	License	Price
71 Google App Engine	-	-	-
-- Heroku	-	-	-
-- OpenShift	-	Apache 2.0	Free (Online, Origin), 43,000$ (Dedicated), 50.00$/month (Online Pro)
-- Amazon Web Services	-	-	-
-- Microsoft Azure	-	-	-

Google App Engine

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Top Con

Proprietary

You can't get all the stack components and self host the same infrastructure yourself. Depending on the API used, the code itself would be tied to Google App Engine. See here for some libre/open source re implementations of the APIs. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use

Google App Engine is very easy to use. All you need to do is install the SDK (which in itself is easy as well, and the documentation is very heplful) and run the command needed depending on the type of project to deploy it. For example, to deploy a golang application, you run golang deploy inside the project folder and it will be automatically deployed. See More

Top Pro

Increases application speed considerably

Google App Engine integrates with Google's CDN out of the box and it distributes your application's assets through that, increasing loading speed considerably. See More

Heroku

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Top Pro

Easy to start with

Getting started with Heroku is very easy. It's a very straightforward procedure and a beginner can set up their first app in two minutes. Often it's just a matter of a couple of git commands and it's all set up and running. The official Heroku docmentation also helps a lot. See More

Top Con

Constrained by addons

If you want to fully customize your production environment, then Heroku can be seriously constraining. Installing libraries or services can not be done unless there is already a Heroku plugin for it. See More

Top Pro

Excellent error logs

When your deploy fails you see a legitimate error log. Many of the other PaaS give you nondescript messages and debugging is a pain. Debugging Heroku wins by comparison. See More

Top Con

Further deployments are slow

While starting with Heroku is fast and easy, and the first few deployments are actually very fast, larger applications tend to have slower deployments. It takes some time for the dynos to restart and while they are restarting the application is completely offline. Which means that you can lose precious seconds of application time. See More

Top Pro

Add-ons let you easily add features and technologies

Heroku has a vast list of plugins and services that can be added to an instance. These plugins cover things from databases to email systems. This remove the task of having to install services and setting them up manually. Heroku does it all for you. See More

Top Con

Really expensive

Heroku starts getting really expensive once you leave that free tier. It's not just the bare Heroku service that is costly, the addons as well are very pricey. See More

Top Pro

Simple scaling

Heroku instances can easily be scaled up or down by increasing or decreasing the number of available dynos for that instance. This can be done through the CLI or through Heroku's web UI. See More

Top Pro

Dedicated build servers

Heroku has dedicated servers for building app dependencies, to ensure that you won't have issues like "out of memory" errors when deploying your app. See More

Top Pro

Mature

Heroku is one of the oldest PaaS providers. The fact that it's been around for such a long time means that it had a lot of time to mature over the years. There's also a massive number of articles, guides and tutorials on Heroku out there for beginners and advanced users. See More

Top Pro

Free option

Heroku offers a free tier which contains a single dyno instance. It offers 512MB of memory and 100MB swap space. See More

OpenShift

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Top Pro

Open source

OpenShift is an open source PaaS provided by Red Hat. See More

Top Con

Official customer support is lacking

OpenShift seems to rely more on written documentation and on the community to solve any problem users may have. The forums and IRC channel are active and very helpful, but the official customer support could be better. See More

Specs

License:Apache 2.0

Price:Free (Online, Origin), 43,000$ (Dedicated), 50.00$/month (Online Pro)

Versioning:Follows Kubernetes Versioning

Top Pro

Easily scalable

Openshift uses the PaaS instance/dyno model. It allows developers to deploy their code to a specified number of dynos. Each of these dynos is pre-configured to run a piece of the application that is hosted on them. For example, some of them can access the database, others can respond to HTTP requests or process background processes. Developers can define their processes and assign them a different task, this gives them granular control over their hosting service and performance of the application. See More

Top Pro

Autoscale support

You can set OpenShift to automatically scale your application depending on the traffic it's getting. See More

Top Pro

Built-in continuous integration

Continuous integration is not only built-in OpenShift, it's actually a standard part the workflow. See More

Top Pro

Can be used to introduce specialized tasks through the application hosted on it

Because of its high flexibility and customization power, OpenShift can be used to create specialized tasks for the application being hosted on it. For example, an entire array of dynos (also known as gears) can be dedicated to media transcoding in order to build a custom media converter infrastructure. See More

Top Pro

Small learning curve

Learning to use OpenShift is pretty easy. Most environments can be set up in a few simple steps and for everything else the official documentation and third-party resources are extremely helpful. See More

Microsoft Azure

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