Why do hosting providers increase prices?

I use Layeredtech as a hosting provider. It has been working fairly well. But lately they have started to increase the price substantually on existing servers. They clame that “As with so many service related items and goods purchased in today’s economic landscape, costs associated with providing those goods have increased.”

Is that true? Are the cost for electricity, computers, bandwidth and employees increasing that fast? Layeredtech has raised the price around 20% yearly, on HP servers that now are three years old.

I think it is too much and we will be moving our business away from Layeredtech, I feel that they are betting on the lock-in effect: it takes time and is expensive to move your services to another provider.

Are other hosting provider also increasing their prices?

Groovy on Netbeans 6.1

How do you enable Groovy support on Netbeans 6.1 fcs?

I read somewhere that you enable the development update center. So I did and then Groovy & Grails was available. I selected it and it said it wanted to install a bunch of other modules, among them Weblogic and WebSphere support (??).

After they where installed I restarted and Netbeans didn’t start. I had to reinstall from scratch. Not fun.

NetBeans 6.1 is (not) slow

I love the new features in NetBeans 6.1. Groovy support and faster startup are my favorites. But the responsiveness in the IDE is worse than in 6.0. It is so slow that I am thinking about downgrading to 6.0.
Expanding a tree, moving from tab to tab in the editor, even getting a menu displayed is often dead slow.

I am surprised I haven’t seen this mentioned in the blogs. Is it only me who have this issue? I’m running on a first generation MacBook with 2 Gb of memory. Java 5.0 naturally (Thanks for nothing, Apple).

I guess I should be looking at upgrading my laptop…

Update:
I did and the slowness was probably all to blame on the old laptop falling a part. On this new shiny MacBook Pro 6.1 rocks. Java 6, at LAST.