Hosting ASP.NET - knowledgeable programmer, hosting noob - Scaling and Speed Question

Question

Apologies for this huge question.....please bear with me and try to help :)

Previous employers have all had in house hosting or people other than me to deal with that side of stuff and all my personal projects (ie low traffic) have been comfortably handled by servergrid.com who allow any number of domains even in their basic package.

I am about to take on more serious projects and have little clue about hosting, the questions to ask and what to look for. Some basic research has been done but I am honestly confused by the number of metrics involved when main thing i care about is SPEED & SCALING.

I have noticed that servergrid db servers for instance shares many 100s DB users/server so I imagine a shared package where your paying just 2$/month for sql server, tho a bargain, is not going to scale beyond a hobby site.

So:

• is moving to a dedicated or virtual dedicated server the simple answer to speed and the only real metric I need to worry about?
• dedicated pricing is a big jump on servergrid - are there premium shared services that don't put a bazillion people on the server - it doesn't seem obvious from the sites, would it make a huge difference?
• the landscape seems to changing in a big way - IIS7 and Server 2008 seem to have all these features like Isolated Application Pools/ Hyper V, are these just BS hype or things that seriously help with scaling and speed?
• Lastly cloud hosting (specifically http://www.rackspacecloud.com) - it runs .NET right, is it fundamentally architecturally different to anything else or just use of the word cloud for marketing? It looks v cool - but is it just normal hosting with a different billing model and a somewhat easier way to scale? Is this similar to the much hyped squarespace hosted blog/site system?

Sorry for my rambling style of question and would be deeply grateful for someone who can just in relatively plain english sweep away some of my basic misconceptions....

Thanks!

Answer 1

Okay, take a look at Amazon Web Services. They are very flexible in terms of infrastructure (both hardware and software) and I find their rates to be ok. Also, their business model revolves around "using" not "leasing" (ie you pay based on what you use, for how long, etc).

I think it's a good starting point.

Answer 2

Since your main concern is "speed" & "scale" you may also take a look at Windows Azure and SQL Azure Windows Azure

A nice brief video explanation by Steve Marx.

What is Windows Azure

Answer 3

I would stay away from shared hosting for a "more serious" production deployment. Amazon's AWS is as good a place to start as any (rackspace has a similar service which now supports self-provisioning). Failing that, you might carefully evaluate how much scale you really need. If you know how many users you'll have and have any idea what their usage patterns will be, then get dedicated hosting to fit. If the number of your users is unknown and unpredictable, and their usage will be spiky, then go with AWS.

That would be my first-pass approach. YMMV, and it will take time to fine-tune your own approach.