For quite sometime I've been having issues with running Blojsom on a shared Java host. See its possible but not ideal. It would seem Blojsom is best placed in a dedcated servlet container where it can have room to move. So for quite some time I've been holding on to my very cheap shared hosting by Interadvantage. The System Admistrator has been helping me out for quite some time but it just seems Cubicgarden.com is just generally growing in popularity and outgrowing its small plot of internet land. For the last 2 months I've been trying to cut down on system hit by using OSCache and Log4j to solve the errors I might be getting. But it came to a head just recently… here's a slightly edited email I recieved.
I've noticed that whenever your site gets hit hard, our server's load goes way up and other sites become unresponsive. This is particularly a problem in the mornings, from about 8 – 12 AM our time. I assume all the geeks over here who are addicted to your blog get their RSS feed (because you get a lot of RSS traffic then), and then go hit your blog if they see something of interest.
I also took a look at your stats, and about 25% of your page loads come from crawler.bloglines.com.
At any rate, your site is successful, and active, and it depends on Blojsom. When it's getting hit, your site dominates a loaded Dual Xeon server, so I think it's unlikely we can reduce the load to an adequate level just by tweaking Blojsom. Sadly, I again need to encourage you to look for another host. I don't think it's fair for you to try and host your blog in a shared environment; I really think you should put it on a VPS or dedicated server so that Blojsom can't hog CPU and memory that is being shared by other sites.
This came to a head this morning because our company president was trying to do something on your server at 10:00 AM, and he was very upset by the performance. He wants resolution to this situation, and suggested we give you 30 days to find a different host.
It has been fun working with you, and I'm sorry to write this note. I do wish you the best in your future endeavors.
Gratefully,
interAdvantage Administrator
So once again I'm on the look out for a good java hoster which provide virtual private servers for people on tight budgets. So far the cheapest I've found is 4Java.ca's private tomcat at 14.95 candian dollars a month for Tomcat 5 with 600meg of space and 10gig of data transfer. But Daily Razor's RazorBLAZE package attracts me because they also supporting Cocoon cost 19.95 american dollars a month for 5gig of space and 80gig of data transfer which is fantastic in comparision. VPS land seems ok too at 3gig of space and 40gig of bandwidth. One of the things I loved about Interadvantage which seems hard to to come by is, the friendly and knowledgable system administrator. The System admin has been working with me for quite some time and I know for a fact that this email was something he didn't want to write. We tried to get Cocoon working in a shared environment but came to the conclusion that it was not possible with serious security overrides. So please don't blame the ISP for this letter, its my fault for trying to slot a popular blog and amazing blog software in a shared environment. I'm sorry to the other people on the same server and I'll be moving soon.
So if you have any other hosts which do Java servlets, allow for at last 5gig of transfer data a month and cost as little as 10 pounds a month do please recommend them to me in the comments.