5 ms·

I'm not an expert with the Microsoft stack, but aren't there ways to mitigate the costs? I've heard Mono supports (most of?) ASP.NET and you don't have to use

by riprock 16y ago

I'm not an expert with the Microsoft stack, but aren't there ways to mitigate the costs? I've heard Mono supports (most of?) ASP.NET and you don't have to use SQL server either. What other costs are there specific to the Microsoft stack?

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- sciolistse 16y ago
  What he's getting at (I think) is that, you could work around that by using Mono on a linux server, Postgres, MonoDevelop, so on.. Though I wouldn't go down that route personally, so I agree with you.
  - archon 16y ago
    Didn't mean to delete my earlier comment. Actually I'm glad he asked the question, because I wasn't aware .Net MVC could be made to work under Mono until I looked it up.
pbz 16y ago
I would've loved to see a rough breakdown of how they got the the "5 figures" cost...
- dnewcome 16y ago
  SQL Server licenses will get you there pretty quickly.
  - euroclydon 16y ago
    DB Servers are irrelevant when you are talking ASP.NET, so long as you use NHibernate.
    - robconery 16y ago
      Tell that to MySQL which runs like an ape through a mud bog on Windows.
      - pbz 16y ago
        Then put MySQL on a Linux box, no need to have it on Windows...
        theBobMcCormick 16y ago
        And then you have the added complexity of two OS platforms to support..... I think they made the point in the article that they could have overcome the obstacles of the ASP MVC platform, but why? They said they're more productive on Rails, they like working on it better, and it's cheaper. What positive would there be (for them) of staying on the MS platform?
        InclinedPlane 16y ago
        How many mixed platform server shops do you know of? If you're going to go linux/OSS for your DB you might as well go all the way.
- robconery 16y ago
  SQL Server license: $7171 per processor - we have a single quad machine... which we'll likely need to split into two machines, incurring extra licensing fees. Our servers were hosted at MaximumASP and they gave us a bandwidth quote with additional servers that was 4 figures (remember, this is 3 years out). Visual Studio is $1200 a pop - this is for two people. I'm already at 5 figures and I didn't include Expression/Media Encoder and so on. http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/pricing.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/pricing.aspx http://www.microsoftstore.com/s/visualstudio http://www.microsoftstore.com/s/visualstudio
  - matthewking 16y ago
    Didn't look at Windows Azure as an option? http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/ http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/
    - javery 16y ago
      We didn't seriously look at Azure for a couple reasons: 1) It's expensive compared to other hosting platforms. 2) I hate lock-in to a particular platform. If we coded against Azure tables we would be locked in to Azure. If we used their SQL platform we would be space constrained. 3) I have used Azure and deployment, updates, and troubleshooting are all slow and cumbersome. It is still a very immature platform.
      - matthewking 16y ago
        We're looking at making the move from Rails to ASP.NET MVC. So pretty much the opposite of what you've done, and we're planning on hosting on Azure. So I read this thread with great interest. We've found that like for like the Azure platform is very well priced and is actually less expensive than our current Ubuntu setup, as well as being cheaper than comparable high level Microsoft hosting providers. We don't much like lock in either and for the parts of the Azure platform that will lock us in we're extracting the code into a wrapper so we can replace with the minimum of work should we need to switch hosting platform in a hurry. Database wise we're going with SQL Azure and their 10GB limit I find to be quite spacious for our needs, although that would depend entirely on what you're storing. I believe they have 50GB databases in the works for the near future? The deployment times are an issue and I have heard similar, but again I believe if you upload the project yourself then request the update the deployment time is greatly reduced making it less of an issue. It would take some doing to match Capistrano deployment though which is simply awesome and something I will certainly miss.
- redstripe 16y ago
  This article is pretty short on costing details. Silverlight encoding aside (because that's competely unrelated to asp.net mvc deployment) you can deploy web sites really cheap on the microsoft stack. Windows Web Server: $400 SQL Server Express: Free (Databases have a 4 GB maximum size) I can't image how it would cost them 5 figures to use asp.net mvc. I find the productivity of the MS development stack to be well worth the meager cost. Take stackoverflow.com - a hugely successful site that I believe runs off 3 servers (originally 1). Jeff and Joel put this together on a pretty tight budget and I bet their site handles a bigger workload than the OP's site.
  - riprock 16y ago
    To be fair, Jeff and Joel are still on Bizspark. StackOverflow is ~2 years old.
    - redstripe 16y ago
      And after 3 years if they need to spend 10k on licensing for a very successful site that will be peanuts compared to their own time spent. Or do they value that at nothing? I think this is a bad article/interview because it gives the impression that you can't do websites in asp.net MVC on the cheap.
      - javery 16y ago
        You are assuming that we would spend more time using RoR then ASP.NET, we have found this to be the opposite. We build out and deploy features in much less time then we would on ASP.NET now.
        kenjackson 16y ago
        Not sure if this is feasible, but it would be great to post your ASP.NET vs RoR code to compare the delta.
      - robconery 16y ago
        When is $10,000 peanuts? Seriously - I'd rather bonus a developer that money then hand it over for something I can get for free.
mattw 16y ago
> I've heard Mono supports (most of?) ASP.NET and you don't have to use SQL server either. I wrote a medium-sized online game for a guy who wanted to do it in Mono/MySQL. True, Mono does implement a lot of ASP.NET, and a lot of things work fine, but there are still rough edges that drove us crazy to the point that I finally convinced him to switch over to a Windows server (from Linux/Apache). Some examples: * Deployment: Mono was very touchy about deploying changes. If you drop in app_offline.htm and then replace every part of the site with new files, it usually worked. When it didn't, it would hang Apache and/or just start returning 500 errors until the web server was restarted. (Whereas with ASP.NET, you can drop in individual files and/or updated DLLs and the site will smoothly recompile as needed.) This was somewhat okay on dev, but got very old very fast in production. * Strange memory errors: I'm still not sure what was going on, but we had some strange behavior going on where the application would get itself into states that should not have been possible. In one instance I was able to track it down to a particular variable assignment that simply would not happen, despite the code clearly being executed. (E.g., "int x = 42; x++; Trace.Write(x);" would write 42. More complex than that, but that type of thing.) My wild guess is some kind of memory allocation in Mono, but I don't know. Could have been my code somehow, but I have never seen the problem since switching to a Windows server. * Feature lag: By its very nature, Mono lags behind .NET and it got old being able to use cool 3.5 features (such as LINQ) on other projects and be stuck with 2.0 in Mono. I think Mono's an impressive project, and my hat's off to the folks to have worked so hard on it, but after some experience with it I decided that if I'm going to write stuff in C# I'm doing it on the Microsoft stack.
javery 16y ago
We didn't look at Mono because the amount of code we had was fairly trivial and rewriting it in Rails actually let us simply alot of it and write it better than we did before. I love Mono though and I am actually using that on my other startup (http://adzerk.com http://adzerk.com) instead of rewriting since I have so much more code there.

by riprock 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

sciolistse 16y ago
What he's getting at (I think) is that, you could work around that by using Mono on a linux server, Postgres, MonoDevelop, so on.. Though I wouldn't go down that route personally, so I agree with you.
- archon 16y ago
  Didn't mean to delete my earlier comment. Actually I'm glad he asked the question, because I wasn't aware .Net MVC could be made to work under Mono until I looked it up.

pbz 16y ago

I would've loved to see a rough breakdown of how they got the the "5 figures" cost...

dnewcome 16y ago
SQL Server licenses will get you there pretty quickly.
- euroclydon 16y ago
  DB Servers are irrelevant when you are talking ASP.NET, so long as you use NHibernate.
  - robconery 16y ago
    Tell that to MySQL which runs like an ape through a mud bog on Windows.
    - pbz 16y ago
      Then put MySQL on a Linux box, no need to have it on Windows...
      - theBobMcCormick 16y ago
        And then you have the added complexity of two OS platforms to support..... I think they made the point in the article that they could have overcome the obstacles of the ASP MVC platform, but why? They said they're more productive on Rails, they like working on it better, and it's cheaper. What positive would there be (for them) of staying on the MS platform?
      - InclinedPlane 16y ago
        How many mixed platform server shops do you know of? If you're going to go linux/OSS for your DB you might as well go all the way.
robconery 16y ago
SQL Server license: $7171 per processor - we have a single quad machine... which we'll likely need to split into two machines, incurring extra licensing fees. Our servers were hosted at MaximumASP and they gave us a bandwidth quote with additional servers that was 4 figures (remember, this is 3 years out). Visual Studio is $1200 a pop - this is for two people. I'm already at 5 figures and I didn't include Expression/Media Encoder and so on. http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/pricing.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/pricing.aspx http://www.microsoftstore.com/s/visualstudio http://www.microsoftstore.com/s/visualstudio
- matthewking 16y ago
  Didn't look at Windows Azure as an option? http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/ http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/
  - javery 16y ago
    We didn't seriously look at Azure for a couple reasons: 1) It's expensive compared to other hosting platforms. 2) I hate lock-in to a particular platform. If we coded against Azure tables we would be locked in to Azure. If we used their SQL platform we would be space constrained. 3) I have used Azure and deployment, updates, and troubleshooting are all slow and cumbersome. It is still a very immature platform.
    - matthewking 16y ago
      We're looking at making the move from Rails to ASP.NET MVC. So pretty much the opposite of what you've done, and we're planning on hosting on Azure. So I read this thread with great interest. We've found that like for like the Azure platform is very well priced and is actually less expensive than our current Ubuntu setup, as well as being cheaper than comparable high level Microsoft hosting providers. We don't much like lock in either and for the parts of the Azure platform that will lock us in we're extracting the code into a wrapper so we can replace with the minimum of work should we need to switch hosting platform in a hurry. Database wise we're going with SQL Azure and their 10GB limit I find to be quite spacious for our needs, although that would depend entirely on what you're storing. I believe they have 50GB databases in the works for the near future? The deployment times are an issue and I have heard similar, but again I believe if you upload the project yourself then request the update the deployment time is greatly reduced making it less of an issue. It would take some doing to match Capistrano deployment though which is simply awesome and something I will certainly miss.
redstripe 16y ago
This article is pretty short on costing details. Silverlight encoding aside (because that's competely unrelated to asp.net mvc deployment) you can deploy web sites really cheap on the microsoft stack. Windows Web Server: $400 SQL Server Express: Free (Databases have a 4 GB maximum size) I can't image how it would cost them 5 figures to use asp.net mvc. I find the productivity of the MS development stack to be well worth the meager cost. Take stackoverflow.com - a hugely successful site that I believe runs off 3 servers (originally 1). Jeff and Joel put this together on a pretty tight budget and I bet their site handles a bigger workload than the OP's site.
- riprock 16y ago
  To be fair, Jeff and Joel are still on Bizspark. StackOverflow is ~2 years old.
  - redstripe 16y ago
    And after 3 years if they need to spend 10k on licensing for a very successful site that will be peanuts compared to their own time spent. Or do they value that at nothing? I think this is a bad article/interview because it gives the impression that you can't do websites in asp.net MVC on the cheap.
    - javery 16y ago
      You are assuming that we would spend more time using RoR then ASP.NET, we have found this to be the opposite. We build out and deploy features in much less time then we would on ASP.NET now.
      - kenjackson 16y ago
        Not sure if this is feasible, but it would be great to post your ASP.NET vs RoR code to compare the delta.
    - robconery 16y ago
      When is $10,000 peanuts? Seriously - I'd rather bonus a developer that money then hand it over for something I can get for free.

mattw 16y ago

> I've heard Mono supports (most of?) ASP.NET and you don't have to use SQL server either. I wrote a medium-sized online game for a guy who wanted to do it in Mono/MySQL. True, Mono does implement a lot of ASP.NET, and a lot of things work fine, but there are still rough edges that drove us crazy to the point that I finally convinced him to switch over to a Windows server (from Linux/Apache). Some examples: * Deployment: Mono was very touchy about deploying changes. If you drop in app_offline.htm and then replace every part of the site with new files, it usually worked. When it didn't, it would hang Apache and/or just start returning 500 errors until the web server was restarted. (Whereas with ASP.NET, you can drop in individual files and/or updated DLLs and the site will smoothly recompile as needed.) This was somewhat okay on dev, but got very old very fast in production. * Strange memory errors: I'm still not sure what was going on, but we had some strange behavior going on where the application would get itself into states that should not have been possible. In one instance I was able to track it down to a particular variable assignment that simply would not happen, despite the code clearly being executed. (E.g., "int x = 42; x++; Trace.Write(x);" would write 42. More complex than that, but that type of thing.) My wild guess is some kind of memory allocation in Mono, but I don't know. Could have been my code somehow, but I have never seen the problem since switching to a Windows server. * Feature lag: By its very nature, Mono lags behind .NET and it got old being able to use cool 3.5 features (such as LINQ) on other projects and be stuck with 2.0 in Mono. I think Mono's an impressive project, and my hat's off to the folks to have worked so hard on it, but after some experience with it I decided that if I'm going to write stuff in C# I'm doing it on the Microsoft stack.

javery 16y ago

We didn't look at Mono because the amount of code we had was fairly trivial and rewriting it in Rails actually let us simply alot of it and write it better than we did before. I love Mono though and I am actually using that on my other startup (http://adzerk.com http://adzerk.com) instead of rewriting since I have so much more code there.