Asp.net mvc app on a shared host move to Windows Azure during peak load possible?

Question

I have an ASP.NET MVC web application that is hosted on a shared hosting account. The site has no issues during regular usage. However the nature of the business is such that for one week out of the month we have very very high traffic. During these high traffic peak load times, my application has several "Service Unavailable".

One of the possible solutions I am looking at is to spin up a Windows Azure web role during peak traffic week and spin it down again after the week is up. (I know exactly when the load is going to be high) Right now, we don't have enough revenue to justify moving the site permanently to the cloud.

My questions is how to I handle DNS. I would like the move to Azure and back to hosted service to be seamless to the user. The user should be able to type my normal URL and go to my hosted site during off peak weeks and to the cloud app during peak week. My guess is to add some kind of CNAME record to the DNS server but I have no idea how to go about doing this. Anybody know of any resources on how to update the DNS so this scenario would work?

Answer 1

Is it possible to just have the MVC site hosted on another web hosting account permanently? It doesn't necessarily have to be an Azure account, does it? Is the site written in MVC1 or MVC2?

Answer 2

If your shared hosting server cannot handle the peak then 1 instance of the web worker role in Azure probably won't work either.

I would try something else: keep your asp.net code on that server but move all the static content somewhere else (for example the Azure CDN) using a subdomain. If you use Jquery and serve the file from your website then you can change the link to either Google's CDN or Microsoft's CDN already for free.

Answer 3

Yup, a CNAME record sounds to me like the way to go. See http://blog.smarx.com/posts/custom-domain-names-in-windows-azure. (Sorry, one of the images looks broken... I'll try to patch that up.)

The scheme would be: have www.foo.com point to your current app instance, and then change it to point to something.cloudapp.net when that week comes up... then switch it back after the rush is over.