App hosting scenario - what is the best solution?

Question

I'm building a web app/service, and I'm trying to determine the best hosting scenario for the system.

• Windows, ASP.NET. SQL Server
• Medium sized SQL Server database (in the gigabytes, but not HUGE)
• Medium load web traffic...a good number of heavy users, but the number of total users isn't massive
• A process queue for work that must be done by an offline process (a Windows program to process the queue)
• Some attempt at cost effectiveness

I would love to host this myself (from home), but Business FIOS is unfortunately not available for me.

Most hosting providers are restrictive on the database size, and I'm concerned about implementing the offline queue process.

Ideas? What is the best "hosted" solution for this scenario?

Answer 1

Rent a dedicated server in a datacenter, it's doesn't cost as much as you think. You will get your 40-100GB of disk, and full control. The other advantage is that if something goes wrong with the machine, you can get another one online relatively quickly. A downside is that backing up the machine can be expensive, and keeping a backup cycle can be almost impossible.

If you are looking into this solution, google "Dedicated Servers". One of the first ones I picked, had hosting from $60/mth for a celeron up to $180/mth for a dual code Xeon with (including bandwidth). They came with 250-500gb hdd. All up not high performance, but a good start.

Answer 2

Why not go with hosting in the cloud? Providers like Amazon AWS, SliceHost, etc. are quickly overtaking dedicated server providers because of their ease-of-propagation. You can setup multiple instances to run your apps, an instance for your dB, and an instance for your web server, if needed. Or, you can run it all on one.

This could also work well for you for multiple reasons:

• I suspect you aren't wanting to spend a lot of money
• I suspect you want something that will scale to your needs
• I suspect that you might want to start with one instance running all of your servers (web, db and app), but may want to easily migrate up to three or more servers later.

I'd take a look at VPS/cloud hosted solutions, as they are very easy to manage, and rather cost effective. Hope this helps!

Answer 3

I like Dreamhost, but am pretty sure they just provide MySQL, not SQL Server. Lots of space and cheap, but can be slow at times. Quite responsive, supportive and apologetic when my SVN service went down last week (bad config on their end).

For my main server which needs root access, I use John Companies. More expensive, but you get to install whatever you want. Unix jocks; might not support Windoze.