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Where to host .NET applications?
- sirkneeland 13y agoInteresting, thanks for sharing. I would have just thought "Azure and done" but it's nice to see that there are other options in this ecosystem.
- jasonkester 13y agoMissed the real answer: In your cage at the local colo. The sweet spot for the Microsoft stack is one beefy server. While you can rent that from a cloud provider, you're just plain always going to get a better deal by building your own box and dropping it in a datacenter. It's not anywhere near as daunting as it seems to do so, and it will run you about $400/month all in, amortized out over a 3 year box lifetime even including licenses. That'll get you the firepower of a medium sized cluster of Linux gear running your open source stack of choice, without having to deal with a dozen virtual machines spinning up and down to deal with load. It'll just handle as much traffic as you can throw at it, up to the point where you're big enough to simply pull a half dozen of your hundred devs off what they're doing to help scale you up. That's probably the reason you don't see many .net paas companies around. For the most part, they're not the right tool for the job.
- skeletonjelly 13y agoSome people just don't want to deal with colo. I know I'm sick of it. I enjoy mucking around with the stuff and spending the company money of course but when shit hits the fan it's pretty annoying. Same could be said for cloud of course. Currently dealing with a random NIC lockup on a VCloud hosted SQL Server for a client. I feel hosting issues are inescapable regardless of where you go.
- rbanffy 13y agoThat's a good solution, until you need to do a major upgrade, or when you need to hire additional capacity for a temporary spike (say a campaign). It's only a solution if you are OK with occasional downtime - because you'll need to stop everything to apply service packs. With something like EC2, you just spin up a similar box with newer patches applied, redeploy your application, load-balance between your versions and just delete the old one when you are happy. I cannot imagine going back to colo. Or even physical boxes. If I were forced to have a physical box, the first thing I'd do would be to deploy everything on virtual machines or containers inside it.
- jevinskie 13y agoIf you're willing to spend the cash, 3 servers can offer you a hot failover with a spare staging server. Of course with just 3 servers, you would have to accept failing over to a different version while you update the 2nd server.
- esw 13y agoYeah, it's a cost vs. peace of mind equation. I've done both colo and managed, and in my case, having someone (e.g Rackspace) manage the ecosystem is worth the added cost.
- RachelF 13y agoThe main problem with .NET is the higher price due to the Microsoft tax. That said, it has advantages over the free stacks.
- wslh 13y agoWhat prices are you calculating? You can install and use Microsoft .NET without Visual Studio for free, so the Windows OS is the only price in the server in that case if you use a free database, etc.
- recursive 13y agoYou can even use VS for free, as long as it's the Express version, which is capable enough for a lot of use cases.
- jinushaun 13y agoAt my previous company, despite being a .NET shop, our main problem was not the cost--even though SQL Server is outrageous. It was the difficulty in implementing continuous integration and deployment. RDP is not a scalable solution. Implementing Chef on Windows was a major pain. The insanity of having to install VS on the build servers just to get automated builds of web apps. MS, what were you thinking with making VS a dependency for building websites?! I know TFS offers a lot of the benefits we were looking for, but we were committed to git. (This was before they added git support in TFS) We were also burned by a lot of bad MS versions of things in the past, so were weren't eager to dip our toes into TFS.
- sitharus 13y agoInteresting list. Though I didn't see much consideration to Mono on Linux, which is my personal deployment strategy. It would have been nice if it was compiled in to a larger comparison table so I could see it all on my widescreen display, but an interesting read nonetheless.
- cybrjoe 13y agoI've been trying for weeks to get a Mono environment that will host an MVC4 application (minus async/await). Any suggestions?
- sitharus 13y agoI haven't tried MVC4 yet, I was waiting for async support in Mono. Personally I run everything on a VPS, because I'm not worried about scale. If I was running something larger I'd probably go with Azure.
- chris_mahan 13y agocan't do Select Into in Azure.
- cmircea 13y agoSo run SQL Server in a VM. Or MySQL. Or PostreSQL. Or whatever.
- sargun 13y agoEven with the new dedicated Azure SQL Always-On instances?
- chris_mahan 13y agoi'll check.
- 13y ago
- maslam 13y agoWe host Cloud Cellar on Windows Azure and have had positive experience doing so. PS: The BizSpark program is really good for .NET developers - use it!
- cpayne 13y agoBizSpark has to be one of the most under promoted feature by Microsoft. I think its absolutely fantastic and it boggles me why they don't make more noise around it...
- vyrotek 13y agoBizSpark is awesome! My company wouldn't be around without it.
- benferris 13y agoBizSpark is a great program and we were excited to take advantage of free Azure hosting included with it. However we learned from our customers that there is just too much latency between the web server and SQL Azure. We found much improved performance by moving to a Storm SSD server with the web server on the same box as the database server. Very happy with that decision.
- stephengillie 13y agoThe only downside is paying for those services after BizSpark ends :)
- nreece 13y agoHere are some more suitable (reliable and inexpensive) options (based on first-hand experience and research/testimonials): VPS: AppliedI (http://www.appliedi.net http://www.appliedi.net) or UltimaSystems (http://www.ultimasystems.net http://www.ultimasystems.net) Cloud: Azure or AWS (or even DigitalOcean or Linode if possible to run under Mono) Dedicated: ReliableSite (http://www.reliablesite.net http://www.reliablesite.net) or OVH Canada (http://www.ovh.com/us/ http://www.ovh.com/us/) or Hivelocity (https://hivelocity.net https://hivelocity.net)
- nreece 13y agoFew more, with SSD RAID (found from recent survey for an ASP.NET app): Dediserve (http://dediserve.com http://dediserve.com), RamNode (http://www.ramnode.com http://www.ramnode.com), DotBlock (http://www.dotblock.com http://www.dotblock.com)
- skilesare 13y agoI've been using appharbor for a long time and I've been very happy. The recent additions of spdy and web sockets is really great....they've been very active in integrating with other providers. It is pretty shocking how easy it is to spin up a $10/month 10GB sql server instance. And in general, it 'just works'.
- thinkbohemian 13y agoCurious if anyone has experience running .NET applications under mono on Heroku?
- dazbradbury 13y agoYou probably want to see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6241570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6241570
- kayman 13y ago+1 for Azure or AWS
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- dyml 13y agoHappy to see some .NET posts on here! Also, comments that doesn't include bashing over the evil M$ and how they will rip your startup apart. Very nice list, i was not aware of many of these solutions. I have used Azure for my private sites before, and it is a really nice solution. Scott Hanselman wrote an interesting article, comparing Azure Web Sites to your $5/Month Host. Read it here: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PennyPinchingInTheCloudWhenDoAzureWebsitesMakeSense.aspx http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PennyPinchingInTheCloudWhenDoA...