ColdFusion hosting

In the past few years, I have tried out a few different ColdFusion hosting services. I thought I would share my experience and hopefully somebody may find it useful in their research and decision making process for hosting their ColdFusion application. I've tried GoDaddy, GearHost, xtreme-host, and Hostek. Before that I was always writing applications and running them locally on my work laptop. Of course they were work applications so they would get deployed on our own servers. I guess I was pretty spoiled and didn't realize how nice it is to have access to the ColdFusion server itself and ColdFusion Administrator to set up mapping, datasources, debugging, etc... not to mention direct access to the database back-end such as MS SQL Server. I quickly realized how subjective the deployment and management of your live application is to the hosting service that you choose. If I could recommend one thing, it would be to thoroughly research your hosting service options before you commit to anything. It seems like most services will offer you some kind of trial period with no long-term obligation. Interestingly enough, it also seems that some hosting services are also willing to 'price-match'. Where am I, Best Buy?? I find that funny. I guess not only in this topic but in life, the older I get the more I realize that most everything is negotiable. Especially if there is a product or service involved and you are the consumer. And especially in this economy. Companies are more willing to be flexible to keep your business. But I digress. I am listing The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of what I've noticed of the hosting services that I have tried.

Go Daddy
My recommendation, if you have a very basic site that is pure html or maybe if you are using some very simple ColdFusion scripting, then I say go for it. However, if you are putting together a real ColdFusion web application, then I say forget about it. They disable a lot of functions and tags that virtually render this service unusable for anything real world. Sean Corfield has a post with about a gazillion comments (yes, I know gazillion is not an actualy number) on GoDaddy's ColdFusion hosting service that cover much more detail than I want to get into here. But I can tell you that GoDaddy disables the cfobject tag and the CreateObject() function. Which pretty much means eliminates a lot of real-world code right there (including Ray Camden's BlogCFC which this Blog is built on top of). Other ColdFusion features disabled include much Java support (JSP, Java servlets, and Java Objects), CFExecute and CFRegistry. What is the upside?? It's cheap. You can actually get basic service for less than $10/month, and then actually purchase the ColdFusion add on for an extra couple of dollars. The other nice thing about GoDaddy is that they are well known, so they will not dissappear overnight (keep reading, and you'll see why that is important - lol). As far as their administrative panel and database management, whoa. Their interface is really way too busy and cluttered. I am a Senior Web Engineer and it took me some time to figure out how to navigate through their site just to perform basic tasks.

GearHost
Gearhost is a lesser known hosting service, but they do support not only ColdFusion but ASP as well. They are not as cheap as GoDaddy, but the main thing here is that they do not disable mission critical tags/functions such as CreateObject(). Their basic ColdFusion hosting plan comes in at $16.99/month, and they do offer some promotional deals. Their administrative interface is much more simple and intuitive than GoDaddy's (it would have to be). And I was actually impressed with their support ticketing system. One thing I liked about their support system is that you can view your tickets online, and there is a complete history availabel for you to look at. This takes some of the guess work out of the status of your support ticket. An it's nice to see a comprehensive history of the actions taken along with the correspondence. Another thing that I liked is that I was able to use SQL Server Studio Express to manage my database. I can run the client locally from my laptop and connect to their database server. This makes it much easier and intuitive to manage my database instead of going through some kind of 3rd party web interface (yuk). The only thing I question here is security. When you log in, you can actually see all the databases set up on that server. YOu can't browse them, but should I really be able to even see them at all?? I would think they could tighten that down somehow. I have a couple of friends who are currently using GearHost for their ColdFusion needs. Overall I have had a positive experience with GearHost and I would recommend their service.

Xtrem-host
Um, ya. On the positive side, it was cheap! Emphasis on the 'was'. I was actually hosting my original blog on that site (along with another guy I work with). We liked the fact that it was so inexpensive - about $5/month. I guess this is truly a case of you get what you pay for! Long story short, as it turns out this was literally a one man show. Nobody knew it until one day their websites went away. Poof. Gone. Actually, the preclude to that was when support calls / emails stopped getting responses. Turns out that the dude was laid up in the hospital for a few months. Then shortly after that the poof happened. I wasn't too broken up about it because all I had was my old blog on his server and I could rebuild the code pretty easily. No biggie. But some people were actually using the service for real web applications. Doh! It was like pulling teeth for them to try to recover their code and their data. If you have a spare 30 minutes or so, you can read about all the bloody details here. Wow, I didn't realize people could get so nasty over a hosting service. Oh the humanity. Needless to say, even if I wanted to recommend this hosting service (ya right), they just faded away into the night. Eh, $5... no big whoop.

Hostek
I did some research not that long ago (inspired by the lame attempt of ColdFusion by GoDaddy) and I came up with Hostek. They maintain all the ColdFusion tags/functions that I've needed thus far. In fact, that is the hosting service I am using for this Blog. AND, they are really cheap - coming at $5/month for ColdFusion support (that includes hosting + ColdFusion). I just started using them in the last couple of months, but thus far I don't have any complaints. They do offer a 30-day money back guarantee if feel like giving it a test drive. I'll have a better idea of how I like it in a half-year or so. They use Helm Control Panel for their support (which I've used before) and I it's pretty decent. So far I'd give it a thumbs up.

I haven't use it before, but I've heard a lot of people say good things about HostMySite.com. It's more expensive, but I think they offer better service for more high-traffic, highly available web applications. I've also heard pretty amazing things about CFDynamics and their dedicated hosting. Definitely more expensive, but much more flexibility and control there. Whichever route you end up going, if nothing else I would advise taking regular backups of your database just in case your hosting service goes Poof.

-Jim