I Can Empathize

Jan has a good point in this post... jan blog: It is very expensive to work with Grails. I got lucky when I found free hosting for a year. More accurately I was in the right place at the right time. If I hadn't already been experimenting with OpenSolaris and GlassFish for hosting Grails applications with a MySQL database, I wouldn't have seen the offer for a year of free hosting from OStatic. If I hadn't seen the offer I wouldn't have signed up and meet the requirements to get the free hosting. I have a VPS with 512 MB RAM. Even with the large size of a Grails .war file it will deploy multiple applications. I would like to try using shared libraries to be able to make very small .war files and host lots of applications. I haven't been able to get that to work on GlassFish V2 and most of the documentation I am finding for this feature is for GlassFish V3 Prelude. My hosting provider doesn't support V3 Prelude at this time so I'm not able to go that route just yet. When you consider it only costs $20 a month to host a full blown Java app that seems very reasonable. But how many $20's a month does it take to become unreasonable? I'm lucky, I still have 10 months to worry about how to pay the monthly hosting bill and I expect by then I will be able to find a provider supporting GlassFish V3, I'll have figured shared libraries out, and the economics of hosting a bunch of little applications will be reasonable.