In the course of doing this blog and writing example code for it, or knocking together small applications to help myself and possibly other people, I need a small amount of code to be hosted in a public-facing environment. Examples of this are the ColdFusion (and ColdFusion Builder) Bugs RSS feeds, my experimental easier-to-use search UI for the Adobe bug tracker, and the Twitter bug notifier thingey. These all run fine on CF9, but there's a few things I want to try which require CF10 (mostly stuff I want to experiment with, like web sockets).
My stuff is currently hosted with CFMLDeveloper, which offers a good free hosting service for developers to test stuff out on. However on the ColdFusion side of things, they only run to ColdFusion 9. This is down to licensing / upgrade costs. The situation is summarised on this blog article I wrote earlier about how much ColdFusion 10 there is in the UK.
(Aside: CFMLDeveloper also offer Railo as a hosting solution).
So if I want ColdFusion 10 hosting, I need to look elsewhere.
I did a google for "ColdFusion 10 hosting", and the first link was one back to Adobe. This seemed promising. Working my way down the list:
- Edge Web Hosting: does ColdFusion 10, but not for free.
- Media 3. Ditto: they do do CF10, but no free option.
- Ayera Technologies. Same.
- CrystalTech. The initial link on the CrystalTech website goes through to some other outfit called "NewTek" (who operate out of the domain thesba.com), but they don't have a free option either.
- HostMySite. has a nice endorement from Ben Forta, but still want me to pay them.
- CFDynamics. Same.
- Alentus. Don't seem to offer ColdFusion, let alone CF10. Well if they do, they do not promote it.
- Hostek. Do offer ColdFusion 10, and whilst not free, they have a $5/month plan (that's about three quid), which I could probably stretch to.
- Centinated Hosting Services. The ColdFusion link on their site is broken.
- FlintHosts. Offer ColdFusion but don't say what version. And no free/cheap option.
- HostWay. Promote ColdFusion 9, without mentioning ColdFusion 10.
- NetMasters. The link goes to an unregistered domain. Nice.
- Heteml: I cannot read their site well enough to navigate it. those five years of doing Japanese at school were clearly a waste of time.
- Futurism: promotes CF8 and CFMX7! Quite ironic, given the company name.
It's a real pity Adobe stopped supporting CFMLDeveloper, because that could have really helped the uptake of ColdFusion 10 usage. It certainly prevents me from working with it and publicising it.
However I thought I'd throw the question out there... does anyone know of any free ColdFusion 10 hosting out there? I'm not after anything flash, just the sort of entry-level package that CFMLDeveloper offers.
If all else fails, I'll think about talking to Hostek.
Any thoughts?
--
Adam
