I received an email this morning from the illustrious hostmysite.com, the hosters of this very site offering their new Linux VPS plans to me. I’m always on the lookout for a deal so went to have a look at the pricing. In a nutshell, there are two plans that would appeal - a PHP5/MYSQL one for $29.95/month or a CFMX7 Standard one for $116/month.
Yup, $116…a month.
Now this kinda got me thinking. Why the hell is the cost of CFMX so much in a shared hosting environment? Sure, charge the full whack for a dedicated box, but why should the cost be so high in shared hosting and VPS’s? I can’t help thinking Adobe are missing a marketing trick here. Drop the cost of licensing for hosting partners such as hostmysite.com, so that people are able to host on PHP for the same money as CF. It’s no wonder people are not picking up CF when the cost is so much higher compared to other tools.
Normally the cost of CFMX is weighed against saved development time, but when I am hosting something like Feed-Squirrel on a shared box, and am paying for it myself, development time means nothing to me as I am doing it in my free time - for free. By re-writing something like Feed-Squirrel in php I could potentially save myself up to $1000 a year. I know I could use one of the cheaper/no cost solutions like Railo or Smith, but can you find hosting for them that has comparable cost to PHP?
Anyone think the same or have I missed something obvious?
> CFMX7 Standard
I’m confused. Standard?
are they using virtualisation with Standard licenses to have multiple customers on the same hardware?
I would have thought they would be using Enterprise and java instances, sandboxing all the way. I thought that Enterprise was de rigure for hosting, according to Adobe.
Another area of concern (although this may have changed since I last looked in 12 months) is OEM licenses for turnkey/shrinkwrap solutions.
CF8 is very soon. I’m sure Tim Buntel could throw some light onto the subject. aparently CF sales are healthy but being beaten to the punch by PHP or Ruby hosting is not healthy.
Where’s “Scorpio Man” (Forta) when you need him?
I totally agree with you. Hosting costs for CF are prohibiting. It is nearly impossible to justify those heavy prices to a client. For that reason I am stuck with PHP (wich I don’t enjoy at all).
And think about that: in France (where I’m living) there are almost no serious offer in CF hosting.
It is more than time for Adobe to re-think their marketing strategy for CF!!
If you’re on a VPS that isn’t “shared” hosting anymore as far as ColdFusion is concerned, so essentially you’re leasing a full CF license for yourself. Having a VPS is just like having a dedicated box, it’s just not a dedicated physical piece of hardware.
For a lower-cost CFML alternative you might consider the VPSes at viviotech.net. They offer BlueDragon 6.2.1 JX (soon to be BD 7) for $10/mo on a VPS, or you can get ColdFusion for $25/mo on a VPS. I currently have a VPS through viviotech and have nothing but good things to say about them.
@Matt - Surely the fact that I (as a VPS) user require an entire CFMX license to myself would indicate that the cost needs to drop. After all, I would be using a hosting company so I didn’t have to fork out several thousand dollars myself for software.
If you take the HMS model, I am paying over $1000 a year extra, just for CF. Surely this can’t make CF overly attractive cost wise…?
Neil, I agree with you. For that reason I use PHP for low-cost sites or free ones that I run myself. Why pay $100 a month when I can pay $40 for an entire year?! Okay, so a site may take 3 days to code instead of 2, but I make up for that in the savings made from cheaper hosting, a wider choice of hosts, plus lots of free apps that Linux/PHP packages bundle with it, such as forums or even websites in a box (PHPnuke).
Adobe should do more to encourage teenagers, students, and wannabe developers to dabble with CF and to be able to host sites as cheaply as ASP and PHP alternatives. Then when these people finally get a big contract they can afford to get their client to splash out of CF licenses. Otherwise it’s PHP/ASP all the way for these people.
What matt said. One thing though - isn’t the cheapest CF plan more like around $45/mo when it’s all said and done? I’ve been looking into Viviotech since Peter mentioned it awhile back and that’s the cheapest CF plan I could find.
Neil - go with shared hosting - seriously. You can get a reliable shared host for anywhere from $2-$15/mo. Assuming you don’t need dedicated-ish type hosting that should fit your needs.
I believe multiple VPS can share a single CF Enterprise license.
@todd - I am currently using shared hosting with no intention of moving currently. I am merely posing the question why should it cost me so much more because I want to use CF?
Hi Neil,
in Europe we have some hosters for Railo offering hosting for about 5-10$ per month. Railo 1.1 is CFMX7 compatible and 1.2 will be CFMX8 compatible. So I guess you can benefit of the compatibility and/or the new features.
At the hoster you will have your own Railo Administrator in order to configure everything the way you need it.
At the moment we are talking to some US based hosters to offer Railo hosting in america. But it will still take some weeks before they start.
You can contact me if you want to have a list of preferred hosters here in Europe.
Cheers from Switzerland
Gert Franz
Railo Technologies GmbH
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english: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/railo_talk/
It’s important to note that you’re not comparing apples to apples here. You compared the cost of hosting a linux vps to a windows vps with CF and assumed that the difference in pricing is due entirely to CF. That’s not exactly true - remember that Windows itself has to be licensed as well.
A Windows CF VPS Server starts at $116/mth (if paid annually). The same server configurations sans CF would be what we call our .Net VPS Plan, which is only $80/mth (if paid annually). That’s just a difference of $36 per month, which represents the additional licensing cost of CF.
Be fair, Neil - the CF VPS plan at HMS is DOUBLE the hardware specs as the PHP one.
I’m no HMS fanboy, so I do agree with you. These prices are not conducive to widespread adoption of ColdFusion in the middle and low-end market. Perhaps Adobe could release a VPS-specific pricing model?
I fully agree that ColdFusion hosting costs are a major hurdle for web application developers - particularly for beginners deciding how to invest their learning time.
For several years I pushed ColdFusion as the main application server learning tool at our university’s web development program. Student’s loved learning it, but were always disappointed with the hosting costs and lack of open source resources. Eventually we had to switch to PHP due to demand.
Most students have plenty of time and very little money. Trying to sell them on “it’s quick to learn” over “it’s free” is very difficult.
The free developer version of ColdFusion is great, but it needs to be combined with inexpensive hosting solutions.
Microsoft saw this when they announced free video hosting for Silverlight. I hope Adobe will do something similar for ColdFusion 8 and web hosting. It doesn’t have to be free, but perhaps subsidized to be competitive with .NET and PHP solution options out there.
A great solution would be to have ColdFusion on something like MediaTemple’s Grid Hosting - an inexpensive way to host multiple sites with the ability to scale easily.
@Jamie - I had noticed the difference in setup aside from CF, but more importantly, I really believe Adobe need to do something about the other $36 dollars (which as it happens would get me an entire PHP VPS).
For instance, if I didn’t have that $36 paid, I could still get .NET or PHP, so why would anyone want to spend more for CF?
Yup, you’ve got a point - CF does have a licensing fee so it will be inherently more expensive than php/.net. I just wanted to point out that the difference in cost isn’t quite as large as your original post makes it out to be.
Personally I love CF as a language, but then I’ve never had to pay for hosting in my life thanks to my chosen occupation.
Not plugging directly…but I can say we use Crystal Tech for their CF licensing structures….and as a benefit, they are rock solid.
16.95 appeals to my clients for small sites, up to 49.95 for bigger ones….so anything short of VPS or Dedicated, you can find it cheaper.
Before I came around to them 3 years ago, I had to use PHP based CMS frameworks….which is still the case sometimes today. There is no open source, non-profit low cost CMS out there for CF…and that hurts the product as well. Clients ask why pay a CMS license when Joomla works perfectly well for their needs?
I have to look them in the eye and agree. I’ve been with CF since 3.1 and these marketing/product points being discussed here have always pained me.
Keep in mind that the cost of CF plans isn’t always due to licensing as well. I talked to the CEO of HostMySite (I’m a senior employee there) and alot of the cost is due to market demand as well, plus the company’s own business model.
For instance, our prices aren’t the cheapest because quite frankly our support is in a different class than that of most other hosts (I won’t name them but you know who they are). With us you call and instantly get a TECH regardless of the time of day or year, and that tech can usually solve your problem or if not can get it to someone that can within minutes. So we market to high availability sites more than lower-end ‘mom and pop’ sites because they’re the ones that really need us. If you can tolerate your site being down for an hour or two then there are definitely cheap hosts that will get the job done for you.
The higher cost of hosting is hurting the opensource CF arena as well. Look at the number of opensource PHP and Ruby apps vs. the opensource CF apps. Lately it has improved since RIAForge opened up but still WAY behind for a language as old as CF.
Lack of opensource apps like the CMS mentioned above (although there are a few choices out there like FarCry) will continue to hurt the adoption of CF. And Im afraid that unless the CFStandard server were free, its going to remain that way.
Hopefully pojects like Railo and Smith with help this cause but I think its too early to make that call.
I thought it would be helpful for you people to share the company I am hosted with for last 6 months. I am with http://www.hostingatoz.com . The starter CF Hosting plan with them is for $19.99/year . I have seen small downtime (2 times, I think) in last 6 months but it is too good at the prices they are offering CF 7 MX Hosting. Moreover, I am hosting a few personal sites only… so I love them
I’ve got to back ‘Old Age CF Developer’ commets. I’ve used hostingatoz.com for some friends sites die to the cost and have found them excellent! It’s always a case of looking and deciding what kind of site you are running.
[...] There’s been a lot of talk lately surrounding the pricing of Coldfusion, and it’s comparative cost with other application server products (ASP.NET, PHP etc etc). See Adam on Life, the crumb and even Feed-Squirrel for a small sample. This is why I was somewhat stunned to see that Adobe have decided to ramp the cost of the enterprise edition of the new CF8 up by 25% to $7,499. [...]