System Administration - eXist: A NoSQL Database and Application Development Platform - page 408

Hosting and the Cloud
The eXist developers are often asked what is needed to host eXist on a third-party
server and where users can find hosting companies or cloud providers that support
or enable eXist to be used. The basic requirements from a hosting provider are the
same as those needed to run eXist on your own computer or server: you simply need
a system that offers a JRE (or JDK, if you wish to build eXist from source code) of at
least version 6, and allows you remote console access to install eXist.
Unfortunately, full access to a remote host (physical or virtualized) usually comes at a
higher cost than shared application server solutions where you can just upload some
PHP or ASP code. However, eXist should be viewed as an application server platform
in its own right, as it offers far more functionality and convenience through XQuery,
XSLT, XProc, and XForms than lower-level programming languages such as PHP or
ASP, which must also be coupled with database access to even begin to approach
what eXist offers. In this section, we will examine some of the options available for
hosting eXist.
Entic
Entic is a virtual private server (VPS) provider in San Jose, California that has pro‐
vided the VPSes that have powered the eXist Solutions website and Adam Retter's
own websites since 2008.
Entic provides very reasonably priced Solaris zones. These are billed monthly,
depending on the resources allocated to them. With Entic you purchase a pool of
RAM, CPU, and disk space, which you can then allocate between as many or as few
VPSes as you wish. The VPSes can be dynamically allocated and resized on the fly
from the Entic website with zero downtime.
eXist has support for running within the Service Management Framework (SMF) of
Solaris systems (see $EXIST_HOME/tools/Solaris/README.txt ). Entic was initially
chosen for eXist due to eXist's excellent performance on Sun (now Oracle) JVMs
running on Sun Solaris atop Sun x64 servers. Whether this performance metric still
stands remains to be tested.
Two final points in favor of Entic are that it's directly connected to the Internap
Internet backbone , therefore providing plenty of low-latency bandwidth, and that its
support staff are fantastic, being both personal and very flexible in their approach.
Amazon EC2
Amazon is probably the largest and best known of all the cloud providers and offers a
plethora of services, including virtual machines. Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud