Anyone got recommendations on a good DNN hosting solution? I have a lot of sites on shared hosting at the Small Business Authority, which used to be Crystaltech.  Ct was an outstanding host for many years but since the SBA, as they like to call themselves, took over, the prices have tripled without notice, the rules have changed and they are tinkering with firewalls and other stuff that keeps causing outages, which we never experienced till they cam along. In general, they suck. I loved their control center, but I can't justify paying a reseller cost of $19.95 a month for a sites which are not all that active.

since they ahve actually said they are no longer intersected in shared hosting solutions, which was the bulk of this companies business before they took over, i feel they are trying to force customers like me out. Therefore, if anyone has suggestions, please do let me know.

Beth Vest

All i can tell you is that SHARED HOSTING is SHARED HOSTING. For DNN or not, it is a bad idea.

Considering the above, if your need is for shared hosting you must look for companies that know DNN and for companies that provide a unique pool for each DNN installation.

ALL net web applications are very demanding. Keep that in mind.

good luck

Costas

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Discover Venice

 Hi Beth

There is absolutely nothing wrong with shared hosting and DotNetNuke.. To say that would possibly infer that you've had a bad experience and I am sorry to hear that.

However, I run shared hosting for our clients - we have over 300 clients all happily managed on shared hosting to a certain extent, but and this the BIG thing... Greedy hosters who throttle dnn to run like a dog because they are trying to capitalise on hosting revenues, similar to small static sites are just as bad.

We also manage email marketing software, several linux boxes, magento, wordpress, xmod, concrete5 and several other custom apps, but all configured to run at their optimum.

We have virtualisation, but not cloud servers - I know where my equipment and code is.

If you have a good hosting provider who does not throttle dnn, pack too many sites on a single box, then you should be right.

Have you seen what happens when Magento ecommerce goes bad, it makes DotNetNuke look like a rocket even on a bad day.  It's about configuration, understanding how to manage a dnn site as well.

Earlier this year, we acquired a client who was being charged a fortune because of their hosting and sql requirements.. we took over a sql db that was 16 gb .. just crazy and they had all their development code and tools in the root directory of the website.  This is a special sort of madness I do not live by.

I spent a few hours tweaking the db to make it an acceptable 270mb, and spend another few hours optimising the site and it runs like a rocket, along with 140 other sites on the same machine. (OK the machine is very highly specced) but my point is, that properly configured, it's as good as any other cms, blog or ecommerce app around, linux or otherwise.

Also what influences the perception of 'good hosting' is your location - for example - Australia to London - no matter how I try, most sites in the UK are not the fastest because of how they route around the world.

Dallas - Australia - very slow - bottleneck due to the route/hops 
Australia - Singapore, fairly fast - often faster than Australia (VIC) to Australia (WA) becuase WA in Australia is routed differently due to distance.

So, there are more things that make hosting good and bad than just blaming the hosting provider, and believe me if you have cheap, cheap, you can't expect fantastic.  I would not really find it viable to host a site under $20.00 per month because we provide a very hands on approach to our hosting and know all our customers and our resellers get extra support to help them with their business, but again, shared hosting is certainly worth considering for the day to day websites that most people run and DotNetNuke is perfectly suited to this environment. I can assure you of that 100%.

Also having had to move these sites from not only one server to another, but another datacenter to another was a job no less than twice this year (bad IT support nearly did me in) I did move to a virtual server but it's a mother of a machine and what I found the hidden costs were ended up being the backups and redundancy.  And for cloud servers, cpu and ram seems to be the the be where the costs are associated with the charge out often tricky to calculate., 

Anyway if you want to discuss more you're welcome to contact me directly - I am happy to share my experiences with you to help you make decisions that you are confident with.

Oh I loved your first post.. :-) Nothing like losing all impact of a meaning by the words putting in a new meaning... darn that autocorrect.

Nina Meiers

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