Where to host your Grails application

As I wrote recently, I have joined the Grails and Groovy crowd. I finished my first simple web application, which was actually more than just a local prototype, but I needed to host it somewhere. As with all Java based web-application, it is much harder to find a good and cheap hosting provider. It is much easier with PHP. So I started to look for a Grails hosting provider and ended up where every Grails developer will be looking sooner or later - this page.

I scrolled down the list and nothing really suited me. I have to admit that I stopped reading carefully after a couple of hosting providers. Since this was just my own web-application to play with, I did not want to spent much for hosting every month. I did another search in Google and came to this German blog entry. The guy basically recommended 3 different hosting providers for Grails applications: eatj.com, javaprovider.net and mor.ph. Out of these he liked mor.ph the most. So I decided to try them first.

Unfortunately I could not find anything related to hosting on their website. I have no idea what they are offering but web-hosting did not jump me off the screen. Next I tried javaprovider.net. This provider has a 30-days trial offer, where you can test your web-application for free basically. Exactly what I wanted. You choose between shared Tomcat or private Tomcat. In the private Tomcat you have 32MB heap memory, in the shared version the heap memory is shared with other applications. I signed up for a shared Tomcat trial account. First of all, the trial account in javaprovider.net is not entirely free anymore. I had to pay $0.50 when signing up. This is to scare idiots off. The account was created immediately. However, they set up a private Tomcat account even though I wanted a shared one. The private account plan would cost me $9.99 every month. Way to much for my little toy website. I selected some stupid sub domain, like tv3.javaprovider.net - it will probably not work anymore when you read this. I entered the MySQL details into the production environment block of my DataSource.groovy file.

dataSource {
    pooled = false                          
    driverClassName = "org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver" 
    username = "sa"
    password = ""    
}
environments {
    development {
        dataSource {
            dbCreate = "create-drop" // one of 'create', 'createeate-drop','update'
            url = "jdbc:hsqldb:mem:devDB"
        }
    }   
    test {
        dataSource {
            dbCreate = "update"
            url = "jdbc:hsqldb:mem:testDb"
        }
    }   
    production {
        dataSource {
            pooled = true                          
            driverClassName = "com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
            dbCreate = "update"
            url = "...." <--- Enter here
            username = "...." <--- Enter here
            password = "...." <--- Enter here
        }
    }
}

Then I packaged everything again using the Maven 2 Grails plugin.

mvn package -Dgrails.env=production

For some reason the WAR file was not build when I ran mvn grails:package -Dgrails.env=production

Finally I deployed the WAR file into my javaprovider.net Tomcat. It worked out of the box! However, as I started to click around for a bit it stopped worked. I checked my Tomcat logfiles and saw a nasty OutOfMemoryError. Obviously 32MB heap is way to little, and this was even the better account plan in javaprovider.net. I opened a ticket and asked them about Grails hosting. They got back to me after a day, saying the I needed at least 256MB heap for running a Grails application and it would cost me around $30/month. This is simply not true! Read on.

While waiting for the ticket reply, I signed up with the last Grails hosting provider that was mentioned in the original blog post - eatj.com. They have a free trial account too, great for testing. The trial account has even 64MB heap. However, their cheapest commercial offer is $9.85/month, so I knew from the start that I would not use them. To make a long story short, I used their MySQL details, repackaged, deployed and it worked fine without any memory issues. Now I knew at least, that 64MB heap would be enough for my Grails app.

In search for a cheaper alternative to host a Grail web application, I saw an offer from a German hosting provider called Netcup. They are offering a vserver with 100MB of guaranteed memory. The price is very low. You pay one time 10€ which is about $14 and 1,69€ per month ($2.40). Since it is a vserver, you have to install everything yourself, like Java, Tomcat, MySQL etc. When you order the account, they set up a Debian Etch for you, including pre-installed Apache and MySQL. I used this image for a bit but their /etc/apt/sources.list file was pretty limited and I struggled to install Java. I switched to Ubuntu Hardy, which I knew. You can switch between images with a few click in a web console. Their Ubuntu image also had a weird sources.list file but I changed it they way how I had it locally and it worked. I installed Java, MySQL, Tomcat 6 and deployed my Grails webapplication. It worked like a charm.

You get a static ip-adress, which is enough for now. No domain needed for testing. You can check it out here. Log in with (reik/schatz). I am watching tons of TV series like Lost, Heroes, True Blood, 24, Prison Break, Friday Night Lights, Supernatural, Dexter etc. Every time I forgot which episode I saw last, so I wrote this little Grails application where you can save the last episode you have seen.

For me the netcup.de vserver is the best option if you want to host a Java based web application using Grails and Groovy. Here is a comparison of the annual prices including one time fees:

• eatj.com Basic: $98.50


• javaprovider.net Private: $119.88


• mor.ph ?


• netcup.de vserver Aluminium: 30.28€ ($42.71)