Can someone let me into the secret -

I have had DNN on my machine for a week or two now and yesterday had issues setting up my portal.
I am very lucky in that my Server/Host is physically only a few hundred yards away from me so I can talk to the support engineer and have them explain problems and issues personally.

Today I went to speak to him about the set up problems we have had and he didnt seem very happy with what I've been doing.

He showed me the logs for the server that is hosting my DNN portals and the cpu usage graphs too.

I have managed to crash the server a number of times and when I saw the CPU usage graphs I nearly fell over! -You can see clearly each time I make a page request with DNN - the usage just rockets

Is this normal for DNN or am I just really good at messing stuff up and breaking things??
Is DNN alone responsible for the sudden CPU usage or have we go it set it up wrong, or maybe it  .net thats the problem

Maybe he is right -"ASP is great why use dot net the processor overheads are too high"

I am very keen to use this product but if these problems are inherent then maybe I need to use something else

Can som one help me get a handle on this as it is a serious consideration in my business strategy and if DNN  is not the answer then I need to look elsewhere.

I think its a Compac box with Server 3003,  IIS 6 , SQL 2000, DNN 4.3.4
 

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Dave DNN 4.3.5 IIS - 6 ?? SQL Server 2005

I am fairly experienced Microsoft developer.

I am looking at commercialising a web site for a travel magazine.

Currently it is in vanilla ASP but dotnetnuke was reccomended for trial.

We have a friendly MS Server host but they have no DNN experience. (Plenty of Internet, IIS server and SQL though)

At present the site has an MS Access database of articles and simple banner and badge advertising (which is run as part of the magazine accounts)

We are looking to extend the site, make the pages displaying the articles more local aware (promoting business, mainly hotels, relevant to the locale of the article) extending the web site content and developing a method for hotels to book and recieve payment on line.

Additionally we see other market to capitalise on where booking and collection of revenue on clients behalf would be useful.

As this develops the Vendor tracking will hopefully be extended to provide management with more useful and informative tools for their daily tasks.

Some image processing is needed but mainly images are manipulated prior to site upload - the image catalogue is quite extensive.

As DNN and dotnet are relatively new to me any clarification is welcome

Thanks

Dave

Edit 12:50 local time

I have just found the server chache settings on the host set up page - how do these affect performance

And - just as an aside - the sandbox server we used for testing and development is pitifully low on memory - obviously a contributor to the problems - is it possible that this maybe the main cause?

A document for hosting comapnies etc and some technical requirements would assist no?

 

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Dave DNN 4.3.5 IIS - 6 ?? SQL Server 2005