As a Web Professional, such as a Web Designer, Webmaster or Web Developer specializing in ASP.NET Technologies it can be fuzzy at times to decide which platform is best for you and your customers needs. Projects can change along the development path, requirements can change, and Project Managers may alter objectives. Technology development goals almost always are a moving target.
How Do I select the platform that allows for the most flexibility?
Here I will take a look at the different platforms out in “web-land” and shed some insight as to the Pro’s and Con’s of each. The question you should ask yourself is not only which platform is the most flexible, but which one will also Perform and Scale as the demand for resources grow. That’s the flexibility you’re wanting in a solution.
Shared Hosting
Regardless of what enticing features a provider might offer, the technical design of shared hosting is based on the premise of low usage.
This solution is a low cost platform, developed for small sites. Regardless of what enticing features a provider might offer, the technical design of shared hosting is based on the premise of low usage. The provider assumes that the demand will always be low for the vast majority of ASP.NET websites on the platform. Shared hosting works by taking hundreds of customers websites that have many different variants and demands of the platform and placing them on one Server (Computer). It’s much like taking a PC, and letting a hundred different people install the applications they want. The PC wouldn’t perform as well as if only one person had only their software installed on the PC. Performance isn’t something you really think about until the performance is missing. In the world of E-commerce, slow sites equals no sales.
Dedicated Servers
With a Dedicated Server you Prepay for performance upfront.
Dedicated ASP.NET Hosting; that is websites that are served from a server that is under the control of one person normally will outperform shared hosting any day of the week and twice on Sunday. With a Dedicated Server you Prepay for performance upfront. There are no other customers on the server, therefore only the ASP.NET website code that is under your control is executed. If there is a performance problem, then you are assured it’s coming from one of your websites. Maybe your ASP.NET website is getting a large amount of traffic – that’s a good thing!
So, a dedicated server will Perform. That’s great. Will it scale? What if you need to upgrade? All server hardware has limits to the number of CPU’s and RAM (Memory) that can be allocated in a particular server. So, you need to calculate your ASP.NET Sites growth potential. For instance, if you purchase a server from a provider that is capable of running only one CPU and 32 GB RAM. What happens if you need more RAM? or another CPU? That server will not scale! Now you are looking at moving your ASP.NET Website to another server – ugh, time consuming! There has to be a better way. A way to only pay for what is needed and scale more easily when needed. Read on…
Cloud Hosting
Scaling with Cloud Hosting is painless and easy
With a ASP.NET Cloud Hosting solution you get the best of both worlds. You only pay for what you need, your sites will perform better than shared, there is no sharing with other customers on the same Operating System. Scaling with Cloud Hosting is painless and easy. How is this you might wonder? Cloud Hosting takes the idea of a dedicated ASP.NET Server and puts the Operating System in the Cloud (makes the OS virtual). This makes it very simple to increase and decrease the customers resources as needed. If the ASP.NET website grows larger than the normal hardware specifications, then moving the Cloud Hosting instance to another hardware node is as simple as copying the image to the new hardware node. The image would include the entire Operating System, ASP.NET Websites, and any other installed software on the Cloud Hosting Platform.
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