Q:

Hosting terminology explained

I am learning the Play framework, and while looking for a place to host (never hosted a site before) I find myself lost in this world. I do not understand the terminology used for pricing.
I have visited several sites:

http://www.cloudbees.com/pricing-standard-services.cb 
http://www.heroku.com/pricing#1-1 
http://aws.amazon.com/en/ec2/#pricing
http://www.playapps.net/pricing 

All have various tables with hard to understand pricing elements (some of which you need to set)  such as

Build Usage (Builds per day, Average build duration, Working days per month..) 
Dynos? worker dynos, web dynos?

I am just looking to host a small website I developed (currently for learning purposes with an option to maybe grow). I don't know if the listed hosting options above are actually good for me, can any one explain the basics, or at least point me at the right direction? (also can I use any site that supports Java hosting such as http://javaprovider.net/ for running a Play app?)

A:

As described on the Heroku page, dynos are processes running on the Heroku platform. If you follow the links, they cover what dynos are in great depth. All you need to know are in those two links ("web dyno" and "worker dyno").
If you don't know what builds are yet, then you probably don't need to be concerned with CloudBees, which is a PaaS provider, not a web host. They provide a full solution stack for Java development in the cloud, which includes code repository, a continuous integration environment, and assorted Java enterprise middleware.
If you're just learning Java web development, then I suggest sticking to a shared web host that supports JSP/Tomcat or just set up a local test server to develop on. Alternatively, you could install Eclipse and the Google App Engine plugin. This will give you everything you need to develop and run your Java web app locally, and you can sign up for a free GAE account to deploy your web app to, with a very generous request quota before you need to upgrade to a paid account.
If you really want to dive into cloud hosting, then these tutorials might help:

getting started with Play Framework on Heroku
getting started with Spring Roo on CloudBees' Run@Cloud platform

This Play framework plugin for CloudBees might also help.

