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.

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