JSP and servlet hosting

JSP hosting means a servlet container

A JSP is compiled into a servlet, so JSP hosting is servlet hosting: you need a container such as Tomcat that compiles and runs it. The old shared "JSP hosting" plans gave you a folder on a shared Tomcat. A VPS gives you the whole container, which is what most JSP applications actually need.

What to check before you move

• Namespace. Pages that import javax.servlet need Tomcat 9. Pages written for jakarta.servlet need Tomcat 10 or newer.
• JSTL and libraries. Put jakarta.servlet.jsp.jstl (or the javax variant) in WEB-INF/lib if your pages use the tag library.
• Encoding. Set pageEncoding="UTF-8" so non-ASCII text survives the move.
• Database drivers. Bundle the JDBC driver in the WAR or install it in Tomcat's lib directory.
• File uploads. Write uploads to a directory outside the WAR so a redeploy does not delete them.

Deploying

Package the application as a WAR, upload it and run sudo deploy-app app.war. A plain folder of JSP files can be zipped into a WAR with jar -cvf app.war -C site/ ..

For setup details see Tomcat hosting.