I always thought that Java hosting solutions were expensive compared to PHP, Python or any other trendy scripting language

After reading on Tapestry mailing list that Sergey Didenko used Rackspace, which I knew to be the host of Github, we decided to consider it for hosting Wooki.

Rackspace cloud is, as the name says, a cloud hosting solution. Their “servers” offer start at approximately 10$ a month for one part: 256Mo RAM and 10GB of space disk. You pay for what you use on a hour basis. It means if you want to use a part only for 12 hours, you will only be charged for something like 0,15$.

Creating a new machine on the cloud is very easy, you choose the operating system, the size (how many parts do you want) and that’s it! Your new machine is build and in the next few minutes you will receive an email with the IP and the root password.

The good thing is the fact that you can resize your machine whenever you want, i.e. you just made a killer application which is buzzing a lot, you can switch for some days from one part (256RAM/10GB) to four part (1024RAM/40GB) , and then go back to one part. The changes takes effect immediately after rebooting the machine.

Of course, you have got a lot of additional stuff, like backup management, developer API, iPhone application to manage your servers, rackspace cloud “files” for storing lot of data etc.

Finally, for Wooki, this solution is nearly perfect, we only need one part to run wookicentral.com. We have the modularity and the control we want over our server, and it’s cheap.