Deployment - Getting Discouraged

I’m getting really bummed at the seeming difficulty of getting my little web app hosted somewhere. I read that Xojo can spit out a CGI app and thought - “Oh, CGI - everyone supports that, right?”. After spending way too many hours trying to get it to work on my GoDaddy site, I ran across an old thread by Sam Rowlands that pretty conclusively says it won’t work because of a library that Xojo needs and that GoDaddy doesn’t offer in their low-cost hosting plans. I’m not forking out $50 a month for XC, sorry. 1701 doesn’t seem to offer hosting anymore. digitalocean is gone. Juicedhosting looks flaky and their own demo app is 404. All the search results I get on the topic seem to be five years old. Suggestions?

I am new to Xojo so keep that in mind. I’ve been a web developer for about 20 years though. XoJo needs a run time component to render web pages and that needs to be installed on a server. I’ve never encountered a budget web host willing to install specialized components. Not to say one doesn’t exist…

I’m curious about your comment about digital ocean. I use them for work and they’re fine (for typical linux hosting, not something like Xojo… ) - did they/ do they offer droplets for XoJo web apps?

Maybe you could ask the people at XoJo who they recommend for hosting… I’m sure they’d have some options for you.

I’m pretty sure they’ll recommend XojoCloud! :smiley:

Thanks for the heads-up re digitalocean - the link I’d tried was dead, but they do indeed seem to be alive and well.

Update… I don’t understand anything on the digitalocean site :frowning: Droplets, Kubernets, Spaces…?

Digital Ocean is a site geared towards developers and IT people who want to deploy OS/App infrastructure in the cloud. It’s very - very hands on. Imagine building your own linux operating system, setting it up, and maintaining that along with whatever apps you use. Backups, networking, all of that, is on the administrator – that’s you lol.

I’m sure you’re right about them recommending XoJo cloud… I don’t know how expensive it is (or isn’t) but they do have one specific advantage: they created XoJo web apps. Who better to support it?

If you want to use some other hosting, and it sounds like you do, you might want to checkout VPS hosting (virtual private server). Many linux web hosts have this option. It’s “one up” from the cheapest options but you are typical allowed to install components on your own VPS and you get tech support.

As far as I know, ServerWarp is the successor to 1701
https://www.serverwarp.com

you can get low-cost virtual servers, but then you need to dive into installing and maintaining a linux box …
https://www.server4you.com/?_ga=2.122320067.977755375.1548742958-120556753.1548742958

SolVPS offers a $20/month Windows VPS package.

Granted that’s about double what you might pay for a similar Linux VPS. But stand alone Xojo web apps pretty much just run on Windows, and all configuration is through the familiar Windows GUI.

Ask @Karen Atkocius :slight_smile:

I have a couple of the minimum configuration VPSDime.com servers running PostgreSQL, CubeSQL, SFTP, some web pages and a standalone Xojo web app, all for $US7 per month.

You have to roll your own Linux GUI and other tools.

I know it’s hands-on, but I have had a lot of success with Xojo Web apps and Digital Ocean. Using one of their pre-built images for your droplet (which is basically a virtual machine running on their servers), a lot of the work is done for you. I usually use one of their 64-bit Ubuntu images. Their documentation is excellent.

Here are all the web deployment topics:

https://documentation.xojo.com/Category:Web_Deployment

Xojo Cloud is obviously easiest since it’s one-click deployment.

Other options vary greatly as to their level of difficulty, but something with a Virtual Private Server (VPS) is the way to go. Digital Ocean is fine, but you will have to know (or learn) a bit about web servers and Linux in order to get a Droplet set up there.

You might find setting up a Xojo standalone web app is easier than making sure Apache is properly configured to run CGI.

Xojo Cloud[quote=422770:@Julia Truchsess]Suggestions?[/quote]

You can use any VPS service. You can see droplets in digitalocean as VPS.

Maybe there ara some people eager to burn some extra money, digitalocean has a exact same option with 2 GB RAM, 50 GB SSD, 2 Tb Transfer for just $10/ Mo, and even a option with half of that for $5 Mo.

just for gauging, how many concurent users can you expect with the digitalocean $5/mo plan ?

[quote=422788:@Christian Mézes]As far as I know, ServerWarp is the successor to 1701
https://www.serverwarp.com[/quote]

We essentially focus ServerWarp marketing to Xojo but it accounts for only about half our business. I split it off because it was growing faster than consulting. It has had growing pains and not for everyone but offers some distinct capabilities and getting better all the time.

For heavy processing apps, maybe none, for basic CRUD maybe dozens. Obviously you cant use the basic plan for all kind of apps, it is about having options, and if an APP fits in this one, why to waste money on a bigger plan?

You can test and decide what plan fits your app, that is why there are plans from those 1 GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 25 GB SSD, 1 TB Transfer all the way up to 192 GB RAM, 32 vCPUs, 3,840 GB SSD, 12 TB Transfer

If there is one thing I’ve learned building enterprise web applications for over 20 years, nothing is simple.

After 20+ years of JavaScript and other similar web technologies being on the planet, things are more complex to deploy today then ever before. The web application world is splitting into Frontend and Backend development with incredible complexity added with every new framework. Detailed hands on work is now the standard, simple is now looked down on.

Having said that, Xojo is a bit of a breath of fresh air as it hides a lot of that complexity. That simplicity has a price, the cost of Xojo license, the cost of simple hosting (XojoCloud), etc. If you want “free”, then there is always the option of rolling your own with the various web frameworks in the open source arena.

Julia,
I get the frustration that we no longer have simple and inexpensive…I feel it as well, but at the moment, I would rather simple and having to pay a bit, then taking months to deliver a solution that I’m not even sure I can support because of the complexity “free” brings with it.

I personally use use OVH.com (similar to others already listed), but that means I need to manage a Windows or Linux server, make sure it is patched regularly, fix it when I break something. I’m seriously considering XojoCloud simply to get my time back so that I don’t need to be a DevOps tech as well as a developer.

Don’t forget Google Cloud (it’s what I’m using). They have a free tier and offer $300 credit for your first year. Can’t hurt to try it. They have different VMs you can use to create a complete server, or you could containerize a Xojo Web app and connect to a MySQL cloud db. Simpler than it sounds if you run the app in standalone mode. Mainly just a matter of hooking up storage/DB and exposing the Xojo port to 80 (last time I played with it anyway). Moderate learning curve for containers though, but not terrible.

not to hijack the thread. Would people be interested in learning how to dockerize their Xojo apps? I work with Docker all the time and could come up with a “guide” or “walk-through”.

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brilliant idea… i install Docker on my Mac but don’t know what to do next.

[quote=422862:@scott boss]not to hijack the thread. Would people be interested in learning how to dockerize their Xojo apps? I work with Docker all the time and could come up with a “guide” or “walk-through”.

[/quote]
That would be great! I managed to get a Dockerized app running, but it wasn’t pretty. It seems once you have the image, getting it online is mostly a matter of adding it to your repository and deploying it. The thing I thought could be great is the load balancing with shared data…

There’s a Wordpress/MySQL Tutorial that would be pretty close to deploying Xojo to Google Cloud, I think, though I haven’t tried it.