Java Web Hosting — GoDaddy is really Suck

IT is a terrible mistake of using GoDaddy Java web hosting feature. The php / MySQL one has nothing wrong, but the Java part…just simply forget it. It’s a self-torturing.

The reason I subscribed GoDaddy is just because of one feature: user-changable DNS configuration. I’d used about 5 different web hosting companies before and none of them can provide this feature. Some of them allow you to change the A-Record or CNAME of the DNS, but you have to send a ticket to support and they will do it for you.

GoDaddy has a web-interface for all customers to change their DNS record since they have a large portion of customer is just doing domain parking, i.e. they register hundred of domain names in GoDaddy but not using any web hosting service.

GoDaddy also provided Java web hosting services in their Linux plan. “Why not give it a try ?” I activated the Java service, and after a while they set up the skeleton files. I started to put a couple of JSP files, web.xml and jar files in appropriate places.

ClassNotFoundException? Okay, double check. Error. Still Error. Damn. Forgot it. Took a sleep.

In the next day, everything was just fine. Yes, pages came out as expected. I further put some more JSP, jars, classes, etc to there. Everything screwed up again immediately.

After numerous trial-and-errors, I finally figured out how thier Java web hosting was:
- Tomcat 5.3
- JDK 5
- context refresh every early morning around 4 a.m. All Java services will be down from 10 mins to an hour.

The major issue was the context refresh. I constantly changed the web.xml and classes files; and any changes would be effective after every morning ? I could not wait that long to see the change.

Deploying Struts, Hibernate, Spring or other fancy stuff ? Forget it. Just the time spending in debugging the configuration issue will spend a week or two.

Site downtime is another issue I could not withstand. I also had the php/MySQL portion hosted in there, why just the Java portion was down and php are fine ? For a global web site, their downtime was my peak time.

Moreover, sometimes it gave the OutOfMemoryException and nothing worked. Since the Tomcat was shared by other users as well, one person doing strange stuff and everyone else would suffer. Then I had to wait another day for the refresh.

After a month of hair-pulling, nail-biting, eye-glazing, finger-pointing, etc. I gave up using GoDaddy to host the Java portion of my site. However, the plain-old php/MySQL is solid as it should be. I moved all Java stuff to another server, and then I added a CNAME to the DNS to redirect all Java traffic to another IP.

Lesson Learned: Do not use any Java web hosting service if that web hosting company is not specialize in Java.