Can you recommend a good shared hosting provider for a webapp made with Lift framework with Scala 2.8?

Question

I've got acquainted with Scala recently and found it beautiful. I am willing to give up using PHP and use Scala instead for all projects of mine. Now I Use BlueHost for hosting my PHP-based sites. Can you recommend a good alternative that will support Scala?

Answer 1

Basically you need a server/hosting which supports servlet containers (or the whole JEE).

GAE (Google App Engine) and Stax (Stax.net) might be worth to investigate. It certainly depends on the features you are using. While Lift can run on GAE, it can't use things like Threads and has to use some workarounds which reduce scalability/performance. Stax seems to be a bit better in this regard.

Apart from Lift (which is Scala's well-known web framework (every language needs one, right? :-D) you have plenty of alternatives (like Play) depending on how much you want to do by yourself and how much experience you have.

Answer 2

While GAE does support Lift/Scala in someway, but I in my experience, Stax.net is a better choice for Lift/Scala.

It's has a free but fully functional plan (including MySQL database), you could test your Lift/Scala appliction there.

It is easier than GAE, and Lift/Scala is officially support by stax.net (you could see that in this screenshot).

Deploy application to Stax.net is very easy. Basically, you could use Maven/SBT to generate a WAR file, and just upload the WAR file by stax command line script without create the application in stax.net panel, and everything just works fine.

Answer 3

I would recommend against GAE. It does not support the full JDK spec (e.g., creating threads). This is a severe constraint.

Stax.net is a very good choice.

Also, you could use an Amazon EC2 micro instance.