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Does anybody know of a Java web hosting service that is affordable and easy to use?

Yea Amazon EC2, been using it since it started. Moved from Godaddy dedicated Linux servers to EC2. Worked out cheaper, took some time to create the Amazon Image, but once done life is good :)

try eapps.com, mor.ph

mor.ph is quite new though

And the Morph AppSpace for Java was developed in partnership with the guys at Webtide - Jetty.

Do give it's free dev account a spin...

Just because you see a lot of junk new companies being formed with 3 pages of scripts doesn't mean VC's back them any faster. VC's don't back technology, they back people that can execute. If you think starting a company is all about the technology your in for a surprise.

Wait... an "inevitable" slow death cannot, by definition, be avoided.
Anyway, the hosting issue is important, though this article seems to assume that most entrepreneurs are deciding their language of choice, etc. completely neutrally.

I personally did a lot of enterprise development in Java before I started doing small projects on my own... and I still do more Java webapps than other languages, simply because I've already sorted out have to do it "right" and make high-performance webapps in Java, a long time ago. It's extra work to set up hosting (my current hosting environment of choice for small/medium projects is a VPS at rimuhosting), but I don't need to worry about performance gotchas in PHP, RoR, etc.. I've done a few projects in PHP, for example, but a decade of experience still counts for a lot, and far outweighs the hosting negative.

As long as schools do a lot of teaching in Java, and developers are still doing lots of Java enterprise work before setting off on their own, these issues will be offset by that.