Lisp friendly hosting services

[AlexPaes]

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for a Lisp friendly hosting service where i could put my lisp web projects (SBCL + Hunchentoot), I'm fully aware of the list of lisp-friendly hosting services on ALU (http://wiki.alu.org/Lisp-friendly_Web_Hosting) but i wanted some real user experience feedback. For instance, i read somewhere about problems with Xen virtualization versions causing problems with SBCL, and so on. So if any of you guys have any experience with a lisp-friendly hosting please do share it.

Thanks in advance for the feedback.

[dnolen]

I got multi-threaded SBCL up and running on Slicehost along with Hunchentoot and Weblocks. Able to connect to the running image over SLIME from a laptop. Sweet. Most of the problems Lisp hackers had on Slicehost seem to date from last year. As far as I can tell the Xen has been updated and works just fine.
As for the service, I like the fact that Slicehost caters to developers: lots of help, tutorials, and what not.
Also Clozure CL 1.2 (OpenMCL) looks pretty cool and I just now tried installing it on Slicehost and it seems to work as well.

The fact that there's an inexpensive solution for building web applications in Common Lisp or Smalltalk is blowing my mind.

[findinglisp]

I think Xen and VMware will work fine for virtualization. These are "full" virtualization solutions that really allow the software to do whatever it would normally do, but simply virtualize hardware. Where you'll run into trouble are the "containers" virtualization solutions such as OpenVZ where every "container" in the system is really running on the same kernel and there are kernel changes to keep the containers from interfering with one another. I believe those solutions fiddle much more with the memory map, which SBCL needs to stay relatively stable in order to load saved core files.

As an aside, everything I have heard about Slicehost is very positive. Also, they just got bought by Rackspace last week. I have no idea how that will affect their current services moving forward. Ostensibly, Rackspace bought them because they needed a virtualized, "cloud computing" offering and Slicehost had one of the best. Given that people really love Rackspace, I would assume they'll keep up the same high levels of service.

[AlexPaes]

Thanks for the feedback guys, I waited a little longer to see if there were any more user experiences on this matter but apparently not many are using Lisp on these hosting services. I will go with slicehost i guess then, it does seem the most reliable one, i've also had reporst of successfull deployment of seaside applications on Slicehost, that should count for something.

Also, if you guys have pointers or know about any resources on setting up SBCL+Hunchentoot on a production host in a secure manner, please share them, i'm afraid of setting up with one of the hosting services and not knowing how to Lisp everything up.

[findinglisp]

Thanks for the feedback guys, I waited a little longer to see if there were any more user experiences on this matter but apparently not many are using Lisp on these hosting services. I will go with slicehost i guess then, it does seem the most reliable one, i've also had reporst of successfull deployment of seaside applications on Slicehost, that should count for something.

Also, if you guys have pointers or know about any resources on setting up SBCL+Hunchentoot on a production host in a secure manner, please share them, i'm afraid of setting up with one of the hosting services and not knowing how to Lisp everything up.

For what it's worth, Slicehost seems cheap enough that you could buy-in for one month with a small slice to test what you wanted or get started, and then move to a larger slice when you're ready.