How to pick a servlet hosting company

Picking a hosting company is a bit like picking a mobile phone: choosing between the plethora of competing options can be mind-boggling. It's also a bit like buying a digital camera: just as camera companies try to convince us that a huge digital zoom is more important than lens quality, hosting companies will try to convince us that a huge amount of disk space is more important than CPU quota or memory (because the latter are more limited resources and therefore more expensive for the hosting company to offer).

Picking a company specifically for running servlets can involve a few extra criteria beyond those required for static web pages. In this case:

Oh, and silly thing: if you end up asking them if they support Java servlets, be sure that they actually know you're talking about server-side Java. This shouldn't be a problem nowadays– servlets are a fairly standard thing– but I remember one company I e-mailed with this question replied that "all client-side Java will run fine". (Obviously, that's a bit like saying "all HTML files will work fine".)

Well, back to our servlets. On the next pages, we look in more detail at:


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Editorial page content written by Neil Coffey. Copyright © Javamex UK 2021. All rights reserved.