Coldfusion Hosting

Learn More About Coldfusion Hosting

If you are planning a database driven website where scalability is a requirement, Coldfusion hosting is an option well worth considering. Coldfusion is a "rapid application development platform", meaning it is used for quickly building web-based applications. Although Colfusion is a dynamic scripting language, it is similar in syntax to HTML. Since Coldfusion was originally developed to access database information and for use as a web development language, it natively performs complex business logic with a minimum amount of code. These factors make the Coldfusion language much easier for most developers to learn than its counterparts, PHP and ASP.

Coldfusion web hosting was once a scarcity and expensive when available. This was in part because it only ran well on Windows based servers. However, because of its increased compatibility with open source server technologies, many companies are now able to offer coldfusion hosting plans that fall within the budget of most webmasters. Later versions of Coldfusion are based on the J2EE (Java) platform, making Coldfusion compatible with most Windows, Unix and Linux server technologies. It runs on both Internet Information Server and Apache web servers and integrates well with MySQL as well as MS Access, SQL Server and the more costly database servers such as Oracle.

There are a number of factors to consider in choosing a Colfusion hosting package and deciding which server platform it should run on. Although equally compatible with Windows, Linux and Unix servers, certain options are only available on one server platform or the other. One of the areas where Colfusion excels is in its ability to directly interact with Microsoft Office applications such as MS Access and Excel spreadsheets. If this is something you think you will be using, you should choose Windows based Coldfusion web hosting. This is because Microsoft Office will not run on non-Windows servers. One downside of this is total cost of ownership may be higher than on Unix or Linux. Windows hosting in general tends to be more expensive and often does not have the level of support for open source technologies than a Linux or Unix server would have.

If Microsoft Office integration is not a requirement, Linux or Unix Coldfusion hosting may be a better option. These server platforms, along with their accompanying technologies, are often far less costly than their Windows counterparts. This is largely due to the fact that Apache webserver and MySQL are open source and free. Although Coldfusion is scalable and robust, MS Access is not, and more demanding Windows applications are generally built around SQL Server. This can get quite expensive. MySQL is a much less costly alternative to SQL Server and runs best on Linux or Unix.

Whichever platform you choose, Coldfusion itself is platform independent. Your applications can be easily ported to another server.