Apache Tomcat hosting?

[Ron Pulcer]

Does anyone know of any ISP or web hosting companies in Vermont or New England that allow Java Servlets (with Apache Tomcat)?

I wrote a Java Servlet for my Capstone Project. I would like to utilize my Capstone application (music theory web service) from my website, to setup some interactive guitar lessons.

I have used SoverNet for quite a few years (since dialup days), but they only allow for Perl CGI and PHP? I don't want to have to rewrite this application at this point; it is better suited for Java than PHP. I actually have 2 source projects, the core Java music theory engine, and a separate Java servlet that uses the music theory API.

Marlboro GC (Mark F and Ian K) have been gracious to let my servlet continue loitering on one the college's servers. But eventually I will have to move it.

I thought I had a local solution with a web design company in Rutland. They loaded Apache Tomcat on one of their older servers, and I installed my servlet. But the response time was very inconsistent, albeit it was a repeating pattern (fast, very slow, very slow, fast, very slow, very slow, ...). I had informed them that I would like to move my web hosting contract to them (including the servlet), but they were unable to figure out the response time issue on their server, or lacked the time to investigate.

Anyways, I am back to square one. I would like to work with some local or regional business, if possible, instead of some, say some server farm in California. I would rather have the servlet hosted, instead of having to maintain an entire machine.

Does anyone have any suggestions or know of a local / regional hosting company?

Here is the servlet homepage. It has links to test webforms to test the request APIs. The results are either comma-delimited text or XML. The client-side request is from AJAX in web browser (Asynch Javascript + XML).

http://caught.msie.marlboro.edu:8080/mtws_servlet/

Here is a sample guitar lesson page. Make sure that "Marlboro GC" radio button is checked off for the Server option, since the other server I tried no longer works).

http://www.ronpulcer.com/music/mtws/lessons/sample_guitar_lesson_no...

Thanks in advance to anyone who has any suggestions.

Happy New Year,
Ron

[Ron Pulcer]

Tom,

Thanks for the info on EATJ. I checked out their website. It's nice that I could try out a free test account (albeit for 6 hours at a time), and see how my application works in the context of AJAX requests. I would not have to transfer my domain there right away, just host the back-end Java Servlet.

My servlet outputs XML, and not JSP-generated HTML. But hopefully that should work out OK at this hosting site. The monthly rates are not too bad for Basic Plan, which might suffice for my initial needs.

Did you come upon EATJ from your Capstone (i.e. was this the hosting site already used by the BOC non-profit)? Or, did you research several hosting sites before selecting EATJ?

Thanks much,
Ron

[Ron Pulcer]

Tom,

Many thanks for the suggestion on EATJ hosting company! I was able to quickly sign up, do the tutorial (getting started page), and then upload my Capstone Project's servlet (as a *.war file; web archive file).

Here is link to what I set up on my free trial account:

http://mtws.s155.eatj.com/mtws_servlet_20070828

I was able to integrate this Tomcat server into this test webpage with AJAX requests to EATJ (now set as the default server for testing):

http://www.ronpulcer.com/music/mtws/lessons/sample_guitar_lesson_no...

The response time is pretty good.

Now that I have another more reliable option available, I can begin the task (finally) of working on the interactive lesson pages.

If things go well over the next week or so, I will sign up for a month-by-month paid account, to ensure reliable uptime, and avoid the abrupt Tomcat shutdows every 6 hours for trial accounts.

Thanks again,
Ron