Personal website question

[Bacon]

I'd like to get a site started to be able to develop web-based software and have it where other folks can use it and help me test it.

There are lots of places you can pay a monthly fee to get a domain and space on their server, like myhosting.com and others. You could also host your own site. What are the pros and cons of the various options?

Thanks,

[Lasse Koskela]

The benefits of paying for hosting are
+ you don't need to listen to the server humming 24/7...
+ you (probably) get more bandwidth than what your home connection has

The cons are that
- you have to pay for everything (basic hosting, SSL support, SSH access, etc.)
- there are all sorts of limitations regarding what you can do, like upgrading to latest Tomcat at will, for example.

[Bacon]

Thank you.

Any thoughts on a good hosting vendor? Who's good, who to stay away from?

Here's one I found: http://myhosting.com/ Know anything about them?

[Lasse Koskela]

I can't really recommend any provider since I don't have first-hand experience. I have heard good things about LunarPages, though.

However, I strongly suggest contacting promising providers via email to inquire details about their support for servlets/jsp development (things like whether they support .war file deployment or just the exploded directory approach, etc.).

By the way, I recently google'd for hosting providers and posted a list in this thread.

One of our moderators, Frank Carver, has also done a small comparison between a few hosting providers.

[Bear Bibeault]

I've been very happy with mmaweb.net.

[Bacon]

Thanks for all the feedback. I will look into these suggestions and ideas.