J2EE Hosting

[alex achike]

Hey Guys,
I desperately need assistance hosting a J2EE application integrated with MySQL. I have the .war file but unable to sort out the actual hosting. Initially, I considered hosting from my home PC using dyndns/no-ip and port forwarding to map my ip address. However, it appears that my ISP blocks ports 80 and 8080. I also considered getting a static ip, but the cost of a business line and lengthy contract has dissuaded me.
To cut the long story short, I am now using a VPS with Plesk contol panel. But I am clueless about hosting my app with plesk. It does say Plesk supports java but I can't seem to find how to deploy J2EE with these control panels.
Please advise me on your personal experiences and how to go about this.

Thanks.

[Tim Holloway]

There is no shortage of J2EE hosting vendors - and have you searched this forum for previous questions? The main distinction is on how much it's going to cost you.

Actually, I have a wireless business account with Clear that includes 1 public IP address and it's fairly reasonable. $65/month or thereabouts. I don't actually use it for hosting, since I have an older multi-ip account with another vendor coming in over wire lines. That one, however is not only a lot more expensive, it's a lot slower, which is why I added the wireless option. I can get by with serving on the slow link, but when I have to do massive data transfers, the wireless link is what I use.

[Tim Moores]

Since you've selected a hosting company already, have you contacted their support? Do they make any learning/reference materials available?

[Tim Holloway]

Actually, Plesk is a control panel app for virtual machines, not a hosting provider. Whether you can even use Plesk depends on who's hosting the actual J2EE server.

[alex achike]

Thanks guys. I have managed to SSH tomcat to the VPS and deployed the web app. The new challenge is getting the domain to point directly to the web app. Currently, I can run the app using domainname:8080/webapp. This is not the desired address obviously. I have come across using apache modules like mod_jk and mod_proxy but there are numerous configuration problems.

Does anyone have a simple solution?

Thanks in advance.

[Tim Holloway]

alex achike wrote:Thanks guys. I have managed to SSH tomcat to the VPS and deployed the web app. The new challenge is getting the domain to point directly to the web app. Currently, I can run the app using domainname:8080/webapp. This is not the desired address obviously. I have come across using apache modules like mod_jk and mod_proxy but there are numerous configuration problems.

Does anyone have a simple solution?

Thanks in advance.

It depends. There is a convention on RedHat-style Linux servers where you can do this fairly easily by creating a new config file in the /etc/httpd/conf.d directory. To use mod_ajp, the prototype looks like this:

LoadModule proxy_ajp_module modules/mod_proxy_ajp.so

#
# When loaded, the mod_proxy_ajp module adds support for
# proxying to an AJP/1.3 backend server (such as Tomcat).
# To proxy to an AJP backend, use the "ajp://" URI scheme;
# Tomcat is configured to listen on port 8009 for AJP requests
# by default.
#

# 
# Uncomment the following lines to serve the ROOT webapp
# under the /tomcat/ location, and the jsp-examples webapp
# under the /examples/ location.
#
#ProxyPass /tomcat/ ajp://localhost:8009/
#ProxyPass /examples/ ajp://localhost:8009/jsp-examples/

You can also wrap a VirtualHost directive around the ProxyPass if you want to run on a distinct FQDN at its root.

A similar setup exists for Ubuntu/Debian Linux hosts.