High Performance, High Bandwidth asp.net cloud hosting

Question

Hello,

Wanted to know what you would recommend as a hosting provider for a popular asp.net site, bearing performance and scalability in mind.

A friend of mine recommended webhost4life who advertises unlimited bandwidth, but at $10/month, i am wary - especially if the website grows to be popular and chews up a lot bandwidth (say 300GB/month) - I'd like to avoid the possibility of my hosting provider cutting my service because of that (seems that even unlimited has a limit, which is fair enough).

Among the options I am considering are 1. Windows Azure (not too comfortable with their SQL Data Services) 2. RackSpaceCloud 3. GoGrid

Appreciate your thoughts on the above - with considerations such as how easy it would be to transfer from one provider to another, speed, cost.

Apologies if this question seems like a dupe, but i would really appreciate thoughts and comparison on the three providers above.

EDIT - the ability to run scheduled tasks is also important.

Thanks Ash.

Answer 1

Cloud computing is basically a nice alternative to "Virtual Servers", but when we calculate costs, we found that going dedicated servers are still cheaper then cloud services. Today Virtual Server providers and Dedicated Server providers give 1000GBs of bandwidth per month, plus you have full control.

I would suggest Virtual Server hosting which is much better proven and cheaper then cloud today. Cloud is still new.

My friends had regular data loss complaints at one of the three cloud service providers. Almost once in 3-4 months, the hard disk would disappear and reconfiguring it with 10GB of data everytime brings site down for hours.

Currently everyone's SLA says about 99% uptime, but there is no data guarentee. And finally I dont think of any cloud providing at as low as $10 per month, when you add up all services needed to run site, it comes near to dedicated server hosting cost.

Answer 2

Go Daddy has a grid hosting for 5 bucks a month. I haven't used it personally - it might be crap.

Answer 3

Amazon EC2 is definitely high bandwidth and high performance and has supported Windows Server (2003 I think) and IIS for about 6 months now. You can also use Mono with their Linux hosting, there is an AMI (the install file used for each OS) for that.

It's also fairly high cost though, as you're using a service (IIS) rather than an on demand application. So even when IIS is sat there doing nothing and just listening, it will still be using a block of allocated process and memory usage according to their pricing.

You can run scheduled tasks or anything you like as you are basically just getting a dedicated server presumably hosted in Hyper-V in the industrial Amazon web farm.