Our clients often turn to us with a pretty typical set of questions regarding deployment and hosting of the web applications that our team developed for them. Those questions cover a different range of topics: pricing, reliability, scalability, expected traffic growth, load balancing and etc. We broke those questions into a set of blog posts that we’d like to present to you.
What hosting company do you recommend for our project?
There are so many great choices out there in the market that it would be impossible to objectively single out one vendor or another. However, we’ve found a few solutions that work for us pretty well and we recommend them to our customer.
Depending on the complexity, size, number of users on the particular project, our hosting recommendation will vary:
- For simple websites we recommend using either GoDaddy or Rackspace. As a starting package we advise our clients to go for GoDaddy Value package (Windows Server 2008), which would be sufficient enough for typical small websites. Later if needed the client can upgrade the basic package to GoDaddy Deluxe or even Premium. Please, note, that we are talking of a typical ASP/NET/SQL Server configuration which would make sense for the websites with advanced custom logic. We wouldn’t even consider suggesting such hosting for a simple WordPress-based PHP site or a tiny site with a few static pages. For tiny sites like that we recommend a simpler plan which you can find in a pricing table further down the page.
- For more complex projects requiring something more sophisticated than a basic package, we suggest our clients to go with Premium or Ultimate packages on GoDaddy. Projects in this category may include various websites and applications initially designed for large audiences, with multiple features and expected high server stress during multiple data-exchange operations.
- For complex projects, which initially account for dynamic and gradual expansion and growth, flexibility in resources being used (data storage, processing time) as well as dynamically changing traffic, we recommend our clients to deploy on Microsoft Azure, one of the most secure cloud services, which would support dynamically changing resources usage based on each project needs. Microsoft Azure solution would guarantee flexibility on any project stage, and at the same time would increase security and stress-resistance of the system as a whole.
In this case we create a standard ASP.NET MVC version of the application, which works with MS SQL DB via NHibernate. This version is ready to be deployed to either a standard hosting or a cloud.
How much would the hosting cost?
One of the key factors when choosing a hosting service for your application/website/service would be the cost.
In this table we have summed up the most universal hosting tariff plans:
The cost for hosting on Azure of each particular project can be easily calculated using calculator on Windows Azure official website.
See sample calculation below:
If you are a new startup company, please, take a look at Microsoft BizSpark program which offers great discounts for new companies. The MS Azure has a special pricing plan.
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Please, stay tuned for the next posts where we will look into more advanced topics like scalability, migration to Azure and more.
