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I'm looking for a web host that will let me run a Haskell web application. VPS's seem attractive to me because you can run essentially anything you want. But some of the cloud hosts offer really nice scalability in terms of hard disk space and bandwidth.

Does anyone know of a host that will let me run exotic languages like Haskell but can also seamlessly scale up the hard disk space/RAM/bandwidth/CPU available to my host?

bstpierre
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Bill
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7 Answers7

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If you just want very simple hosting with CGI, NearlyFreeSpeech.net supports Haskell and some other less common languages. I personally also like their overall nonsense-free approach and sensible pricing model (pre-pay metered charges, instead of the usual model of a fixed monthly charge, oversold server capacity, and absurd overage fees).

There are a few caveats however, mainly that they don't permit standalone servers or persistent daemons, only things invoked via CGI from Apache. This might be a problem for some Haskell web app frameworks.

C. A. McCann
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    One note about NFS: you can use whatever version of Haskell you want and whatever libs if you compile the binaries on your own machine (not on theirs). For that you'll need a setup of FreeBSD (probably a virtual one like in VirtualBox). only caveat is that afaik installing FreeBSD takes ~ a day of compilations. – yairchu Jul 26 '10 at 23:28
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    PCBSD is FreeBSD distro for the desktop no compiling required to get a desktop set up. – stonemetal Jul 27 '10 at 13:56
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    @yairchu @stonemeal: Those two snippets of information have made my day! I was always a bit down on the fact that NFSN didn't run the latest version of GHC. – Jacob Stanley Jul 29 '10 at 09:09
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    I've hosted Yesod apps on NFS in the past, it works just fine. Nowadays, however, I use EC2. – Michael Snoyman Oct 12 '11 at 06:21
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Maybe this is obvious, but you can always use Amazon EC2. You'll have full control, and definitely meets your requirement for seamlessly scaling up.

dbyrne
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  • Hmm, that's true. I know that they support seamless CPU scaling - do they also do the same with hard disk space or do I need to contract that out to S3? – Bill Jul 27 '10 at 15:03
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    Yes, you would use S3. You can send content from S3 to EC2 without incurring any data transfer charges for moving the data between the services. – dbyrne Jul 27 '10 at 16:51
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    AWS doesn't have "seamless" CPU scaling. You have to pre-allocate a server from one of their (somewhat arbitrary) sizes. To get disk space, you need EBS -- block devices backed with S3 -- which you also have pre-allocate. The relatively ops heavy experience is one reason there are services like RightScale, Heroku &al. that basically provide a front-end to AWS. – solidsnack Jul 27 '10 at 18:36
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This may be a very late answer but I found that hosting on Heroku with its Cedar stack is the easiest. Yesod has a very clear explanation.

Abdulsattar Mohammed
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Apparently, it's possible to get ghc running on Webfaction. There are also threads about it in the Webfaction support forums, and the admins/techs are quite willing to make an effort to make it work, though it's clearly not something that is supposed to be available out of the box.

EDIT, 2011-08-23: Fixed link.

chryss
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In theory all you need is CGI/FastCGI support. I've had some luck playing around with Happstack on a very basic Dreamhost account by following these instructions:

While non-trivial to get running, this web experiment proves that it is at the very least possible to run Happstack applications on cheap hosting providers such as Dreamhost with little more than a shell account and CGI support.

I've only tried this with toy applications, and don't know how it would scale.

Travis Brown
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Looks like you can also run Haskell in Azure Functions.

Sean Kearon
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If you are using IHP (Integrated Haskell Platform), you can use their free cloud hosting service at https://ihpcloud.com/.

Sohang Chopra
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