Hi All. I'm researching CF hosting providers - I hope this is an OK place to post about it. We're currently hosting sites with Adobe CF and MS IIS and MS SQL Server (Web Edition) on dedicated boxes. Later, we'd like to move to Lucee and maybe a new DB as well, but that's in the future and not a current priority. Open to VPS solution although have mostly used dedicated boxes to date. Clients are SMEs, so we're cost conscious and not worried about very high bandwidth demands. Any recommendations? Feel free to DM or answer here. Thanks!

I don't think the value proposition is there for dedicated CF providers anymore unless you assign a whole lot of value to 'someone else just deal with this server stuff.' We switched to DigitalOcean and Docker/commandbox in 2018 and spend way less time dealing with our server infrastructure than we ever used to, though there was an initial investment to get it all going how we wanted

@sknowlton Thanks! I'm open to changing up our approach but the risk is that if re-coding is needed (e.g. to run in commandbox), that would slow down progress.

Commandbox shouldn't require any code changes for your apps

@sknowlton I'm not committed to any one toolset or technology - in fact would like to make changes, but hard to change horses in the middle of the river, as they say

It was a big jump for us because we were used to IIS and Adobe CF. We did Lucee first, then in one go did IIS to NGINX and Commandbox & Docker

The way I am thinking about it now, I will have to be on MS IIS / SQL Server at least for a little while

In your place I'd look at where I wanted to be in 1-2 years and make a choice for that just to avoid having to change providers. If you know you ultimately want to be doing Lucee + Commandbox then DigitalOcean is great. Ortus uses it, we use it, it's scaleable, it's reliable, it's cheap. You can get windows boxes running on droplets for IIS and MSSQL on windows for as long as you need.

So it sounds like Digital Ocean would be worth talking to

But if you think you're gonna be on IIS for 2+ years then it's just a longer horizon on a return on the investment

I don't mind transitional but we need it to run on day 1 in IIS / MS environment

yeah we did too

We're on Fusebox now but Ortus folks have said that the transition to their framework would not be too terrible - but still, it could be a lot of time to do it

I knew we wanted to land on Lucee/Docker/Nginx/Commandbox but wanted to be able to set everything up in parallel without necessarily committing to them until I could figure out if it was the right move, especially since I was doing it all myself

Exactly!

It's self service until you spend something like $500/mo (which we do) so while I have an account manager, we've never needed them

ok, I will contact them through the site

@nickg When you say "on dedicated boxes" -- do you mean on your own servers in your own data center or do you mean with a specific hosting provider?

@seancorfield boxes in a specific hosting provider in a data center that is not ours.

We had everything hosted with EWH back in the day -- ACF, IIS, Windows, SQL Server -- and we migrated to Lucee, Apache, Linux, MySQL while still at EWH but they didn't really have the expertise for Lucee (you'd have to ask Ortus or the Lucee org whether there really are any dedicated Lucee hosting companies these days). Then we started using CommandBox to run Lucee and made the servers more "turnkey" so EWH was better able to host them -- then they got bought by DataBank and we've had to make things pretty much bullet-proof since they really have zero CF expertise.

Yeah DigitalOcean has no interest or expertise in CF specifically

We're entirely virtualized these days. In fact, DataBank are able to migrate our VMs as-is from data center to data center pretty much automatically. But we've also migrated away from CFML. We have one tiny app running on Lucee 4.5 on CommandBox on Java 8 that just hasn't been a priority to migrate.

HI Nick - We use Viviotech. We use a bunch of VPS'es, but you can host dedicated boxes with them I'm pretty sure. They are also knowledgable about both Lucee and ACF (we are ACF) and can help in that transition when you are ready

Depending on your traffic volume, D.O. might be great for your needs. Ah, Viviotech are still going? They must be one of only a very few CF-specialist hosting companies now...

Yep. Still going strong. I agree, one of the handful left

I've always heard good things about viviotech

Yeah, me too. Never used them myself. EWH used to be great, before the acquisition.

They can also provide manpower if you want to switch to AWS in the future (then they as infrastructure support)

(I mean, they're still good for managed servers/VMs, but they expect everything to be pretty turnkey and easy to monitor)

@seancorfield I know nothing about EWH (whatever that is) or DataBank. It sounds like you don't need CF specific help but that might be helpful for us

EdgeWebHosting.

ah, right

In terms of CF-specific providers, I'd check out xByte. Former HosTek people who made a good showing at CFSummit. Never used them but people seem happyw ith them

They were CF specialists back in the day.

didn't know about an acquistion

I've heard a lot of talk of former Hostek customers jumping ship due to a decline in service quality over the last six months. The Facebook CF group is full of them

Darn, that's too bad. Had always heard good things. Hard to keep up with all these details during periods of intense parenting

CF-hosting isn't a great business model these days and so these companies tend to generalize and as staff turns over they end up with fewer and fewer CF specialists...

Right. Disappointing but I get it

If you can migrate to Docker containers for running your CF apps, you become more turnkey and it's easier for hosting companies to support. Our frontend JS (React) app with Nginx is all done with Docker containers and hosted on a combination of EC2 and S3, all run through ECS/ECR. Deployments are completely automated and do a blue/green rollout across the cluster so there's zero downtime. We haven't gone that far with the backend yet but at least we've moved to fully virtualized machines -- Docker containers will probably be our next step.

How would I figure out whether we are able to migrate to docker? If that is a long question / answer, feel free to ignore

I think there is still the limitation with ACF and Commandbox that you have to have an enterprise license

We did a checklist for switching to Lucee a while back but I didn't have a sense of how big/small a job it would be

The last time I asked was a couple years ago so this may have changed, but might check with Ortus/Brad whether all Commandbox deployments still require enterprise

ok

IIRC it wasn't a position Adobe took so much as the ACF engine detecting the WAR deployment that Commandbox uses and that triggering a requirement for an enterprise license. I think Adobe had kinda sorta said they would change it for Commandbox but idk who/when/how or if it ever happened

I like ACF just fine (not mad at them like some seem to be), but any cost benefits of Lucee seem worth investigating.

My evangelism sense started tingling lol. Yeah reach out if you have questions Nick.

HE'S EVERYWHERE

haha - thanks Mark! Have always appreciated your support!!

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@nickg +1 for xBtye. We moved to them from Hostek. Have been great to deal with and solid so far.

-1 for Hostek. My sites are down (Ashburn datacenter has an outage) with no ETA in sight. Almost 1.5 hours now.