Cost of Hosting Java applications

[Mat Anthony]

Hi,
I have developed a java website, using spring & hibernate etc. I deployed the application to OpenShift free gears, that allows a limited amount of resource to run the application, with constant issues with running out of memory.
I have looked around and the cost of paying a hosting provider seem to be very expensive. Would you consider AWS as an ideal platform for developers who have little money to kick start their entrepreneurial ideas, without
being restricted to cost, that could initially kill off their ideas.

Mat

[Andreas Wittig]

Thanks for your question Mat.

We are covering the pricing models of the most used AWS services in our book to help you to answer such questions.

In general AWS is not the cheapest cloud provider e.g. when comparing the prices for virtual servers. But this is an insufficient comparison. You need to compare the costs for operating the whole infrastructure. So for example you can use a managed SQL server (RDS) on AWS. This might not be cheap but you don't need to care about your database server any longer (backups, high availability, ...). AWS offers a lot of services that help you to build a highly automated infrastructure.

Money is of course a limiting factor. But your time is much more valuable in my opinion. So I would start to build products on AWS to release your ideas fast and with high quality.

What do you think about that?

[Mat Anthony]

Hi Andreas,
thanks for getting back to me. I have not looked at AWS to deploy my application to. Do they provide a cut down free service that will allow me to test and run my application in test mode, so that
I can reduce the bugs found with multi user testing. I would then be in a position to pay for a scaled up environment to host my application. I have invested a lot of time already in development
and as you can appreciate testing is very time consuming. Yes cost is major factor because in some cases that would limit a developer with good ideas getting it live. I think their needs to be an
understanding that their needs to be more affordable services that will allow developers to experiment and become entrepreneurs; this would then lead to more entrepreneurial developers going live on AWS.

Mat

[Andreas Wittig]

Using AWS for testing and development environments is quite common because you can spin up new environments very quickly and shut them down completely after the test or development has finished.

Shutting down unused systems is a big cost saver. For example we are able to shut down testing environments at night or during the weekend for some of our projects.

The AWS Free Tier allows you to use some of the services for free to test them and develop products on top.

[Mat Anthony]

Hi Andreas,
thanks for getting back to me. I will try AWS free tier to deploy my web application to.
Just found out that AWS integrates with eclipse so it should make my life easier. Thanks for the advice.
Looking forward to seeing if AWS is a better solution to Openshift.

Mat

[Andreas Wittig]

AWSome!