I have read many posts on the topic of hosting DNN both here and on ASP.Net. In my opinion it all comes down to what you want, either for your own site or your clients. I understand that many who hang out here are hosting club and personal sites which, if down a little or a little slow does not really matter a lot. Others are hosting business sites for clients. These really matter.
Now before you all shoot me - none of us want our sites down and we all want the fastest possible. However speed and reliability are a trade off against cost and to that end what we want is the fastest and most reliable we can afford. A bit like cars and big boys/girls toys really :)
Personally I have tried cheap shared hosting, semi dedicated hosting, VPS hosting and now I am on my own dedicated server with PowerDNN.
Initially when playing with DNN I went for a $9.95 per month deal. This was just right for my requirements at that time. As I added sites I needed a little more grunt (less competing for resources on the server) and moved to Semi Dedicated hosting at $79 per month. This worked pretty well but had to turn off scheduled tasks like Search Indexing because they were killing me, particularly in the days when the logs were xml files.
With one host support was minimal but the second I found support very good. A number of times when my sites were bad I was moved to another server which improved matters, for a while. Over time I was put on different SQL servers and moved between a number of application servers. Considering what I was paying I feel I got good service.
I use host-tracker.com to monitor my sites setting the pooling interval between 5 and 15 minutes. This kept me informed as to how my sites were behaving and at the first sign of trouble I could contact support.
A little while back my sites began to die. On more than one occasion I was told it was one of my sites that was pulling the server down. I was then offered a VPS account which I began moving sites to. After a few days there I moved back to the Semi Dedicated as I was now running into "out of memory" problems. The VPS account allocated 400Mb RAM which seemed to be inadequate for DNN, in my case. I was running two instances, one 3.2.2 and the other 4.0.3.
After a long weekend where my sites were down more tha up I decided something had to be done or I would have no clients by the time the weekend was over. What I really would like is my own dedicated server! I looked around at what the various hosters had to offer both here in Ireland and anywhere else DNN capable hosting was offered. I was looking for Windows 2K3 hosting with SQL 2005 and whatever else I could get at a good price.
I settled on PowerDNN. I read a post either here or on Asp.Net by Ed DeGange which pointed me in PowerDNNs direction. Thanks Ed :)
I spoke to Tony Valenti, on Skype, and he made me an offer I could not refuse. I now have my own brand new Dell server, 2 * 2.8GHz Xeon with 2Gb RAM, running W2K3 and SQL 2005 Std. In addition I purchased Plesk Control Panel - to simplify my life a little and SmarterMail in order to give my clients email. I know to run "my own" server is more expensive but even if I were to just break even I consider I am winning. My rationale is that you don't hear from happy clients you only hear their recommendations.
I have now split my clients from all on one instance of DNN to each on their own with a couple of exceptions.
What have I noticed since the move?
- Not a single downtime report from host-tracker.com
- Not a single complaint from a client that their site is slow or not responding
- Sites loading much faster - always (I shouldn't have said that!)
- Few, if any, errors in the log files
- Search indexing now runs without error
What have I learned (again!)
- you get what you pay for, sometimes more!
What am I hoping for?
- client recommendations leading to more business
Check this one http://www.liffeydescent.com
Note: I asked Tyler for permission to use his skin on this site.
Declan
Nina,
Although my post is not specifically comparing speeds I think it is relevant. Hope you agree!