Chris Hammond wrote:
I still stand by my suggestion of AppliedI.Net for hosting DNN
Thanks for the kind words there Chris.
dbfrey, GoDaddy is generally pretty good at out of the box application hosting, but you need to remember they are a mass market hoster. It's when you start to integrate advanced features and get more specific with your application that you'll run into problems. The other thing you need to remember is that mass market hosting providers almost all of these hosts follow the same core principle make as much money per server at the sacrifice of service to the customer. You'll generally find two markets of thought here:
1. Pack as many sites on a single server - This is where they'll put thousands of sites on a single web server and in order to accomplish this they'll set restrictions like application pool limits, cpu usage thresholds and ofcourse application pool idle timeouts. It sounds like your performance issue is probably the result of an app pool timeout.
2. Pack as many services on a single server - This is the other train of thought or one I call "the hostgator model". This is where a host will try to use free software to power your website and pack as many different services as they can on a single server. Frequently you'll find they're running SQL on the same server as your website. Often, they won't even use SQL Server but instead opt for the free SQL Express that lacks the Scalability and management features of SQL Server.
As you shop for a new host, I'd check with your host and make sure they aren't cutting corners in either of these areas as it may hurt you in the future or require you to upgrade to a more expensive service later. The last thing you need to remember is it's shared hosting and with shared hosting you're sharing the server resources with other sites on the same server so it's highly possible someone else on this server is causing the pain you're feeling. Today a host can minimize much of this but not completely. Fortunately, the next version of IIS and Windows Server 8, that just became beta, we'll have new tools at the ready to handle this. In fact, two of my senior guys are up in Redmond all this week working with the IIS team on this but I digress.
Lastly, check out WebMatrix: http://www.appliedi.net/webmatrixhosting.aspx it's a FANTASTIC way to manage your DotNetNuke site and test things locally in a dev environment that exactly mimics your production environment.
Jess