About

Folks, plural. We mean that literally.

JavaFolk started as a collective of Java enthusiasts, rallied by one engineer who kept getting paged for problems caused by hosts that didn't understand the JVM. So they built the host they wished they'd had.

Small on purpose

Every account is handled by someone who has personally tuned a GC pause, not routed through a script that escalates after three days of "have you tried restarting it."

Founded 2018

Founded by a collective of Java enthusiasts, rallied by one engineer tired of generic hosts.

Java only

No PHP, no Node, no side businesses distracting the team.

A dozen of us

Small enough that everyone knows the infrastructure by heart.

Java facts we can't shut up about

Ask any of us and you'll get an opinion.

01

Half the team has argued, at length, about ZGC vs. G1 for low-pause workloads. Nobody has fully won.

02

Our founder still has a signed copy of Effective Java on her desk and quotes Item 17 unprompted.

03

We keep a running leaderboard of the worst classloader errors anyone has debugged. Current champion: a triple-nested OSGi bundle.

04

One engineer has deployed to WebLogic, WebSphere, GlassFish, WildFly, and Payara, in that order, and will tell you exactly why we don't offer the first two.

05

We name our internal test containers after Java version codenames. Loom is currently the office favorite.

06

There is an ongoing, entirely serious debate about whether records killed the need for Lombok. It has not been resolved.

How we got here

A short history of getting annoyed at bad hosting.

2018 · Origin

A shared box that couldn't hold a heap

The founders were running a Jakarta EE app on a generic VPS that kept OOM-killing the JVM under normal load. Three support tickets later, nobody on the host's side knew what a heap was.

2019-2021 · Early growth

Word got around among Java shops

No marketing budget, just Java developers telling other Java developers about a host that actually understood GC tuning. Growth stayed slow and mostly word of mouth, on purpose.

Today

Still small, still Java only

JavaFolk now hosts production Jakarta EE, Spring Boot, and Quarkus apps for teams who'd rather talk to an engineer than a script.

Values

What we actually mean when we say "we get it."

Answer the actual question

If you ask about GC tuning, you get GC tuning advice, not a canned macro about clearing your browser cache.

Say the hard thing early

If your plan is undersized for your traffic, we'll tell you before it becomes a 2am page, not after.

Own the mistake

When something breaks on our end, you get a straight explanation and a fix, not a status page that quietly says "investigating" for six hours.

What working with us looks like

A real exchange, lightly trimmed.

You, 2:14pm: Getting intermittent 502s on the Homestead plan, seems tied to GC pauses.
Priya (JavaFolk), 2:19pm: Pulled your GC log, you're on CMS with a heap that's too small for your allocation rate. Switching you to G1 with a bigger young gen, should clear it up.
You, 2:41pm: Pauses dropped from 800ms to under 60ms. That was fast.
Priya (JavaFolk), 2:42pm: That's the job. Ping us if it creeps back up.

Want to be next?

Bring your Java app, we'll bring the infrastructure and the opinions.

See the plans