Hostek.com Offering Free ColdFusion 10 Beta Hosting
Posted February 24, 2012 at 10:03 AM by Ben Nadel
Yesterday, I learned that Hostek.com is offering free ColdFusion 10 beta hosting. It's really easy to setup. Simply add the ColdFusion 10 beta hosting to your cart, select a sub-domain, and checkout. The service is free but they will ask you for your credit card information. After your order is submitted, you'll receive an email with FTP and Control Panel information.
I set up a ColdFusion 10 site in about 5 minutes (mostly waiting for my email). The one page on my site simply CFDumps out the Server scope.
Reader Comments
Thanks Ben, I just created a beta account and will start testing.
@Ricardo,
Very cool - enjoy!
I currently have a CF9 reseller account through them...I wonder if under that condition one could score a test site with CF10 beta under that? In any case, sweet! Thanks for sharing this!
Brian
Yes... From your WCP look at the ColdFusion section. There is an option for CF 10 beta. Just click that and it is auto setup for you.
@Brian,
<maniacallaugh>Thanks!</maniacallaugh>
I know I'm going to see if I can drop that wonderful Taffy stuff in favor of CF10 for REST...I can't tell you how excited this has me.
Thanks Ben.
@Brian, That's exactly what I'm looking at now. I would be happy if you could tell me you're results of your tests of dropping Taffy in favour of ColdFusion 10s REST capabilities?
If you're concerned about any potential for hosttek rolling your account once the free beta expires into a subscription plan without you authorizing it, select paypal as your payment method instead of entering a credit card. By selecting Paypal, they don't do any authorization (i.e., they don't have you sign in), which means that when beta expires, if you want to continue recieving hosttek's service, you have to opt-in by providing a valid form of payment.
Just a quick update, I did indeed do the beta under my reseller account, and it set me up a new site from which to play with it.
The REST stuff is simple to produce and get the hang of quickly. My goodness, I am in love with it. I can envision refactoring a present suite of web services with relative ease.
My only gripe from the Hostek.com end of it is that you really need to avail yourself of an introduced function, restInitApplication. Anuj Gakhar blogged how to introduce this, but I would add, if you're using a Hostek.com account fresh, throw an empty index.cfm up there or throwing a query string check in your onRequestStart() to fire restInitApplication won't do much.
Check this out, too:
http://bk-mp-com-cf10beta.securecb1cf10.ezhostingserver.com/rest/restTest/resttest
--and then--
http://bk-mp-com-cf10beta.securecb1cf10.ezhostingserver.com/rest/restTest/resttest.json
Teehee.
Has anyone heard if Hostek is going to make CF10 available without an upgrade when it goes gold? I am loving this release almost as much as I did CF9. It's definitely a bright ray of light.
@Brian,
Regarding the earlier piece you mentioned... This problem was discussed within the post by Anuj Gakhar that a CFM page is required to register and refresh the REST service because the application.cfc will not be run just by accessing the rest URL alone.
Regarding your last question about Hostek.com offering CF10 when it's available... yes we will be offering CF10 when it's available. This would most likely be on a different server so your site could easily be migrated to the CF10 server when available.
@Kevin Cruz,
Thanks so much for that info! I am also so wary of things like that. Sometimes, when you get married into a situation like that, getting out of it is harder than a divorce. Thanks a heap!!!
