

Jelastic - Holy Grail of Java Hosting? (user review) - jjohns
http://blog.jelastic.com/2012/03/19/jelastic-holy-grail-of-java-hosting/

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ryandvm
If it doesn't have a free tinkerer level pricing tier, I'm not interested.

This is what App Engine and Heroku have going for them.

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gphil
Agreed. If it costs money to learn how to use a new PaaS, adoption will most
likely suffer.

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Pythondj
Totally agreed, that's why ActiveState's Stackato (which also supports Java)
has a free micro cloud. The Micro Cloud is a stand-alone instance of the
Stackato system running in a single VM. This lets you push your apps to an
environment that is functionally identical to a full PaaS cluster. ActiveState
Stackato gives you 3 ways to test your application (1) on a Stackato Micro
Cloud, (2) with an Amazon EC2 AMI or (3) on their Private Stackato Sandbox
Service. check it out at <http://activestate.com/cloud>

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traxtech
Pricing is not clear. From an official blog post, that's ~ 14 $ / month /
cloudlet (128 MB RAM; 200MHz CPU equiv). But what about the databases ?

Pleaase give us a cost calculator!

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jjohns
Sorry that wasn't clear. The way it works is pricing is the same for database
and app servers, i.e. per cloudlet. HDD is free for the first 1GB. After that,
there will be a monthly fee for storage that we have yet to announce. (it will
be in line with what storage is currently running in the market)

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traxtech
Let's do some basic math.

Let's say that I rent two redundant dedicated servers that : \- are each used
at about 80% \- are each equivalent of about 100 cloudlets \- cost each $ 60 /
month

If I want to switch to Jelastic, that's 14 x 100 x 2 x 0.8 = $ 2240 per month
(gross simplification), against 2 x 80 = $ 160 per month + maintenance.

So if maintenance is < 2k€ for me, that's a no deal. In US a freelance
sysadmin will cost more (?), but in my country, no. Too bad :)

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jjohns
I think you are looking at this from the wrong perspective. The idea is that
you only pay for what you use. 2 dedicated servers means you always pay for
the whole thing, plus you have to be the sys admin and a few other things.
Jelastic eliminates that layer and it only charges you for what you actually
use. I doubt you need to dedicated servers full time to run an app. The idea
behind automated scaling is that you eliminate the costs associated with
hosting. I come from a hosting background and this is a HUGE cost saving
measure. Even if you get a sys admin for super cheap (Eastern EU or a BRIC
country), it would still be cheaper to use Jelastic. All that said, another
issue with mirrored, dedicated servers would be the issue of one going down:
with Jelastic you won't have that issue.

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emeraldd
Hmm, I can't seem to find pricing at all on the main site, at least not in a
way that I can make sense of. There does seem to be something linked off a
blog post buried in another blog post. That bugs me.

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jjohns
At the end of this month, we will have the pricing on the site. Our blog post
on pricing was about us launching commercially at the end of this month. At
that time, we will publish pricing on our page.

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emeraldd
Makes sense, though it would be nice to have at least a place holder on the
main site stating that pricing is yet to be determined. I very nearly ignored
jelastic entirely as it looked like I had to signup to get pricing
information.

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jjohns
Thanks for the idea. I'll see if we can't do that today or tomorrow.

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jyou
<http://jelastic.com/team>? Is this a Russian company?

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jjohns
We are something of an international company. We have offices in the US and
Ukraine. Our funding comes from Runa Capital, which is Russian. I am based in
Houston, TX. :)

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jyou
Thanks for answering my question - I'd suggest you to put more information on
jelastic.com, for example, for US customers, do you have your fully owned data
center in US? or you are building on top of other providers (AWS, Rackspace,
Linode etc etc)? if so, how is the quality of service and support of your
provider? Where is your engineer located? You might also want to consider to
provide a 800 phone number. As far as software stack is concerned, I suggest
you to add messaging support for example ActiveMq or RabbitMq - it is
essential for "big" systems, which are more likely be your source of revenue.

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jjohns
To your first question: we actually don't own datacenters. We partner with
reputable hosters within each country that we go into so that there is already
a well known and established company with great infrastructure in place. So,
for example, if you US Jelastic in the US, your actual data would be on the
Jelastic platform with Servint (our US partner). All of our partners have
incredible uptime (Servint has something like 7 9's after their 99.9% uptime)
and service.

As far as engineers and such, we are on both sides of the globe, US and
Eastern EU, so that we can cover all times zones well.

Not sure about adding a support phone number. I've always had bad experiences
when providing that as another option for support, especially in today's hyper
connect world. We find that most our users (>12k) prefer the forums, support
tickets and Twitter and Facebook.

I do like your idea for a messaging system. I've actually been considering
Olarq. I'll most definitely make sure that we talk about this. :)

Thanks for the suggestions!

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julianb
Their documentation looks a lot like Heroku Dev Center. Anyone know if this is
an open source wiki?

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jjohns
We have been using Tender for it, but are most likely going to change because
it does not have the functionality that we need.

