Since we are moving our commerce and small business hosting platform to a restlet based approach, this question interests us greatly.
Generally, the existing application server solutions out there are not designed with low cost shared hosting in mind. This is the gating factor driving our cost to provide something like Tomcat ... to have sufficient control over the container and not collide with other users, you basically need your own VM and practically your own private server. Just providing a place for people to deploy WARs is not commercially viable; users want and often need configuration and customization at the container level. We have found virtual private servers to be an acceptable balance ... but that is often like swatting a fly with a baseball bat. In my humble opinion, this problem is a key point in favor of LAMP and RoR. Java solutions are unfairly expensive and frustrating to get hosted on the actual web. Without a solution, I fear Java web solutions will never really escape the enterprise context into common public use. Because Restlet is far more granular than Servlet and not tightly bound to the whole J2EE container design, I think there is a broad range of possibilities. But much work must be done ... starting with discovery about the possible use cases. I don't know to what degree that's on topic for this list. Maybe the time is right for a restlet hosting discussion forum somewhere, if that doesn't already exist. -----Original Message----- From: "Charlie O'Keefe" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: 8/16/07 9:35 PM Subject: Restlet Hosting? If I want to host a restlet-based website, what are the best options? Obviously I could set up my own box, but I'm not sure I want to go through that trouble. Are there any hosting companies that offer Restlet hosting? Or would I have to use Servlet hosting, and use a connector? Servlet hosting always seems to be expensive when compared with Ruby, PHP, Python etc. Is there any technical reason why companies might be able to offer Restlet containers more cheaply than Servlet containers? Charlie
