ASP.NET hosting

Hello Niners,

I'm looking for a superb ASP.NET host. Can anyone recommend me a host with these criteria satisfied?

- ASP.NET 2 (critical)
- Third-party components may be installed (critical)
- 5-20 TB monthly data transfer (critical)
- 5 GB or more space (important)
- 1/2-1 GB database size
- MS SQL Server or MySQL
- ODBC or ADO
- Preferably large blob size allowed (non critical)
- Preferably large form uploads allowed (non critical)

It turns out to be a bit difficult to find such a provider at a "fairly reasonable price". Especially with large data transfer.

The only host I've found which really had outstanding specifications (in the leage of "Too good to be true"), is Global Internet Solutions (GIS), and guess what? They may just be "Too good to be true". I'm still awaiting whether they'll accept third-party components, but after reading those reviews, I'm not sure I really care, one way or another.

I've found Linux and PHP hosting to be cheaper overall, for example Servage.net, but we really need ASP.NET.

Another promising host is Gate (by Affinity). But even highest profile dedicated servers only go up to 5 TB data transfer (well, "only"). And then the price is in another league.

If nothing better pops up, we'll probably go for Gate, but we're seriously worried about going through the roof with the data transfer. That thought doesn't give a good nights sleep...

I hope you can help.

Best regards
Esoteric

PS If you can recommend a good book on ASP.NET, in particular with focus on databinding, that'd be great too.

What can possibly require 20TB/month bandwidth usage?

The only thing I can think of is yet another flash video site. And FYI, those sites don't store videos as BLOBs but in the filesystem as *.flv files.

www.HostMySite.com  I've had nothing but good experience with them.

UltimaHosts.NET

On  most plans they don't keep track of bandwidth!!!!!!!!!!

z2bass wrote:



UltimaHosts.NET

On  most plans they don't keep track of bandwidth!!!!!!!!!!

Sounds quite interesting, though I note, according to the site:

- Data Transfer: 1/2 TB
- Data Transfer + 10 GB: $ 10 per month

That doesn't really assure me. But thanks for the link.

W3bbo wrote:

What can possibly require 20TB/month bandwidth usage?

The only thing I can think of is yet another flash video site. And FYI, those sites don't store videos as BLOBs but in the filesystem as *.flv files.

I know. It would be nice to be able to keep everything in the database, but it's no big deal.

z2bass wrote:



UltimaHosts.NET

On  most plans they don't keep track of bandwidth!!!!!!!!!!

I'm sure if someone was pulling 20TB a month down their pipe they'd sit up and notice. You'd be lucky to find even a colo provider with that much bandwidth. For these kinds of demands you go to a dedicated bandwidth provider, one hand shaking their representative's hand, the other holding a very, very, thick wallet.

What are you actually going to be using 20TB on??  If your using that much data you should really be looking at dedicated servers

http://www.orcsweb.com/ should be able to provide you with this level of bandwidth.  Other than that, maybe go direct to the data centre and a Tier1 provider.

Edit: Forgot about http://www.discountasp.net/ .  Heard good things about them.  In the UK look @ http://www.netplan.co.uk - very fast, would have the link to support 20TB but they watch bandwidth usage closely.

ben2004uk wrote:



http://www.netplan.co.uk

Good grief! Look at their prices for shared hosting:

100 MB High Performance Web Space 1 GB Data Transfer (per month) 1 POP3 or IMAP Email Account - unlimited aliases Email Control Panel Autoresponder & Email Forwarding WebMail (Browser-based Email) Native ASP 3.0 Support Online File Manager Personal CGI-BIN & Active Perl for Win32 FrontPage Extensions (if requested) Unlimited FTP Access Extensive Support Documentation   £120.00 Per annum

A 100meg webspace and a 1gig transfer... for only £120 a year!

esoteric wrote:



z2bass wrote:  UltimaHosts.NET On  most plans they don't keep track of bandwidth!!!!!!!!!!

Sounds quite interesting, though I note, according to the site:

- Data Transfer: 1/2 TB
- Data Transfer + 10 GB: $ 10 per month

That doesn't really assure me. But thanks for the link.

With the higher prices plans (Such as CSK.NET which is what I own) their panel doesn't track bandwidth... I'm sure they don't track it... I've asked. Check out all the plans... Ultima is really the best, hands down.

ben2004uk wrote:



What are you actually going to be using 20TB on??  If your using that much data you should really be looking at dedicated servers

High resolution product images.

JPEG 2000 would help. So would HD Photo, but JPEG 2000 is not that widespread yet and HD Photo is not even a standard, much less supported. The target is a flash object. Now that Adobe has bought Macromedia, I'm looking forward to JPEG 2000 support in flash, but that's besides the point.

During peak loads it is entirely possible to suck down a lot of gigs of that monthly quota. Either way we can't really pass on the transfer bill to the customer.

Thanks for the links. I'll look into them.

esoteric wrote:

High resolution product images.

A "high resolution" JPEG is about 200-300KB, and that's megapixel level. I can't imagine e-commerce customers wanting fullscreen product shots. The 300px images you see on amazon are what customers expect.

Anyway, assuming that served HTML and the majority of the website account for 0.5%-1% of all your traffic and the rest by these high-resolution images:

2*10¹³ bytes/month
-1% for non-image content:
1.98*10¹³ bytes/month

Divide by 300,000 (300KB) per image: 66000000 requests a month.

That's 2,200,000 per day (assuming 30-day month)

If you're serving over 2 million JPEGs a day (pageviews are going to be waaay higher, something like 7, 8, maybe 15 times more) then you've made some serious miscalculations somewhere. No standalone webserver out there can handle 17600000 page requests (assuming 8 pageviews for every JPEG)

For this, you'd really need at least a rackful of servers dedicated to your website, along with network load balancers, and probably global mirroring.

yman wrote:

ben2004uk said:

http://www.netplan.co.uk

Good grief! Look at their prices for shared hosting:

100 MB High Performance Web Space 1 GB Data Transfer (per month) 1 POP3 or IMAP Email Account - unlimited aliases Email Control Panel Autoresponder & Email Forwarding WebMail (Browser-based Email) Native ASP 3.0 Support Online File Manager Personal CGI-BIN & Active Perl for Win32 FrontPage Extensions (if requested) Unlimited FTP Access Extensive Support Documentation   £120.00 Per annum

A 100meg webspace and a 1gig transfer... for only £120 a year!

They are high end hosters... Have a lot of major clients. http://www.webperf.net Rank Company Mean Rate (K/Sec) 1 Entanet 7398.62 2 Netplan Internet Solutions Ltd 7394.13 3 NewNet plc. 7297.73

W3bbo wrote:

esoteric said:

High resolution product images.

A "high resolution" JPEG is about 200-300KB, and that's megapixel level. I can't imagine e-commerce customers wanting fullscreen product shots. The 300px images you see on amazon are what customers expect.

Anyway, assuming that served HTML and the majority of the website account for 0.5%-1% of all your traffic and the rest by these high-resolution images:

2*10¹³ bytes/month
-1% for non-image content:
1.98*10¹³ bytes/month

Divide by 300,000 (300KB) per image: 66000000 requests a month.

That's 2,200,000 per day (assuming 30-day month)

If you're serving over 2 million JPEGs a day (pageviews are going to be waaay higher, something like 7, 8, maybe 15 times more) then you've made some serious miscalculations somewhere. No standalone webserver out there can handle 17600000 page requests (assuming 8 pageviews for every JPEG)

For this, you'd really need at least a rackful of servers dedicated to your website, along with network load balancers, and probably global mirroring.

Fair enough It's not going to be cheap but a lot of companies out there will help you. Oh, check out RackSpace as well

W3bbo wrote:



Divide by 300,000 (300KB) per image: 66000000 requests a month.

That's 2,200,000 per day (assuming 30-day month)

20 TB data transfer is beyond the worst-case, clearly.

It is more close to 5 TB data transfer, 500 KB images, 20 images per catalog allowing some 16,667 daily visitors throughout the month, assuming every visitor scans through one catalog. Pessimistic, granted.

I suppose my real speculation is the number of daily visitors we can expect with some of the popular material.

esoteric wrote:

It is more close to 5 TB data transfer, 500 KB images, 20 images per catalog allowing some 16,667 daily visitors throughout the month, assuming every visitor scans through one catalog. Pessimistic, granted.

That...is not going to even breach the 1TB mark. Still... 500KB images per catalog page? That's not right, I was expecting no more than 100KB.

Go with a decent dedicated server from godaddy ($100/month) with 500GB/month bandwidth and see how it goes, there's no point starting off with high-end specs if you're unsure you're going to use 'em all.