I'm in the UK and I'm looking for JSP/Servlet host providers that are not exorbitant in price (< £10/month). I am also looking for value-for-money CGI/Perl/PHP host providers. Another service I would like irrespective of the language are "modifying the domain name", e.g. I can have site.myDomain.com instead of www.myDomain.com (I do not know what this is called, DNS management?)

I am looking for JSP/Servlet hosting because that is what I've learnt. If anyone knows how to program in both JSP/Servlet and ASP code and can discuss the advantages and disadvantages of both I would appreciate it very much. I'm currently learning CGI/Perl/PHP and I'm wondering whether it's worth my while to learn ASP as well.

I haven't had much success in finding any UK providers that provide low-cost hosting (Is it necessary to have a UK provider?). I was given the URL for this forum and so I thought I'd post my query here in the hopes of getting some good feedback.

Thanks in advance for any help.
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Russ

First of all, good luck in finding a good JSP/Servlet host. I've been trying to find a reliable one for at least 6 months now and still haven't had much luck.

I would advise you to stay away from cwihosting.com - I had nothing but problems with these guys. The PHPMyAdmin was always a problem and they don't appear to know how to handle the installation and configuration of Resin which they use for their jsp and servlet engine. My JSP's would work for a day or less and then all of a sudden my JSP url's would start resulting in "cannot contact servlet runner at ....whatever.com port 10001". They kept telling me these were being caused by me and I combed through all the log files and could never find any errors, I even emailed them the log files which didn't help either. I was basically restarting my servlet engine every day. Kind of cool that you can restart your servlet engine when you need to, but not cool that you end up having to do it every day.

I have also tried inihosting.com - they didn't work out either. One if the ini guys (Ironlung) posts here a lot, do a search and you can find out more about them.

Webservepro.com offers JSP and Servlets but they are using the Apache JServ engine which is VERY old and not actively developed any longer (moved to the Tomcat project). However, I was VERY pleased with their response and support and they mentioned they were upgrading to Tomcat sometime in the future. If/when they upgrade to Tomcat I will try them again. Erika from webservepro.com is great and easy to work with. The only thing I didn't like about their plan was that a lot of the features/configuration couldn't be done through a control panel, they needed to be handled through support requests BUT they did respond and take care of the requests very quicky.

Currently, I am evaluating cqhost.com for a client and so far so good. I also know someone else who is using them and he is very pleased with their services so far. I will add that I've only been using them for a month.

Other hosts that I know of that offer JSP and servlets that I am considering or know about:
http://www.hostignition.com - appears to be a very new host which concerns me but they have nice plans, keeping my eye on them
http://www.acnshosting.com - they WERE affiliated with CWI but have moved on and now are independent of them, you will notice that their plans are very similar to CWI's.
http://www.hostpx.com - they charge extra for jsp/servlets (7.85 a month I believe)

Hope that helps and let me know what you find and please let me know about any experiences you go through looking for a jsp/servlet host.

Maybe an up and coming host or a host looking to expand their market will take a look at how popular jsp is becoming (check out amazon's bestsellers in the computer area) and realize there is a huge amount of money to be gained by being the best jsp/servlet host out there. If somebody does it and does it RIGHT, they would have customers flooding to them.

Jericho