Hosting that's able to absorb a spike

[filtuh.com]

I'm now researching hosting in anger. Been looking over various cloud and dedicated solutions, and also thinking about global caching service from mirror-image - ie we maintain a fairly low spec server, and they replicate it where it's needed and are able to cope with sudden spikes - ie if some of the big blogs were to feature us it could easily push 20-50k our way - I think even the higher spec cloud servers would groan under that kind of short load. For a site to go down in that instance would be very embarasing, but I don't want to pay for a load balanced 5 server setup if it's not going to be used for more than a few days.

Anyone used such a service or can suggest any alternative providers?

[cmcp]

Amazon web services?

[filtuh.com]

Yeah good call - I missed the bit before about auto-scaling - which is effectively what we need.

Ok thanks :)

[Dwebs-Ltd]

I'm now researching hosting in anger. Been looking over various cloud and dedicated solutions, and also thinking about global caching service from mirror-image - ie we maintain a fairly low spec server, and they replicate it where it's needed and are able to cope with sudden spikes - ie if some of the big blogs were to feature us it could easily push 20-50k our way - I think even the higher spec cloud servers would groan under that kind of short load. For a site to go down in that instance would be very embarasing, but I don't want to pay for a load balanced 5 server setup if it's not going to be used for more than a few days.

Anyone used such a service or can suggest any alternative providers?

Dump your static content on a CDN using Origin Pull then the server is only handling page requests. If you do your code right you should be able to cache db responses if you are using some form of CMS again saving resources.

[filtuh.com]

Thanks Dwebs - it's all custom written in asp .net and heavy on the jquery - in effect we've built a web app rather than a website.

I've actually had an awesome response from mirror-image.com so we'll probably go with them. But I'm going to review it all again.

[Dwebs-Ltd]

Thanks Dwebs - it's all custom written in asp .net and heavy on the jquery - in effect we've built a web app rather than a website.

I've actually had an awesome response from mirror-image.com so we'll probably go with them. But I'm going to review it all again.

How much DB querying is there in it?
Are you also running it on W2K8 rather than W2K3? (W2K8 will give you far better performance!)

The only other thing I would suggest if you are not using any fancy controls which rely on webresource.axd you should be able to use basic output caching at page level so the page isn't constantly processed by the .net engine. Output caching doesn't always work though it highly depends on what is being done at page level.

[Dominic Taylor]

A decent clustered hosting system would do this. You have a PM - and no I'm not pushing my services as we don't run a cluster, but I know someone who run a very good one.

[NetwiseHosting]

Did you manage to find yourself an ideal solution yet?

[mediafire]

Microsoft Azure would be the obvious choice for a .NET app. You should be able to run your application with minimal modifications as it supports the full .NET stack and a significant subset of SQL Server 2008.

[Cohesive Computing]

Thanks Dwebs - it's all custom written in asp .net and heavy on the jquery - in effect we've built a web app rather than a website.


Out of interest, has the app been written with scalability in mind?

Less obvious ways of getting some extra juice (retrospectively) without too much dev cost are to use async I/O to prevent thread pool saturation, switching out unused http modules, and not using auto event wireup.

[mattsaw]

A decent clustered hosting system would do this. You have a PM - and no I'm not pushing my services as we don't run a cluster, but I know someone who run a very good one.

Can you also PM me with their contact details, I'm also looking

[stugster]

We tested VPS.net when they first built it, and I was heavily impressed.

We moved a client (a member of these forums actually), from a dedicated server on to VPS.net when they received a massive DDoS. Although the end result was that we had to do some clever stuff diverting packets, ultimately being on VPS.net meant that we could manage the load easier and understand what was happening during the attack rather than the server falling over completely.

VPS.net aren't cheap; but you really do get what you pay for.

[filtuh.com]

Thanks all - I'm investigating Dominics suggestion as well as the caching solution I mentioned earlier.

I'll also check out azure, and thanks to Cohesive for those suggestions - I'll pass them on to the other half of filtuh - she's the real brains of this operation, I just look pretty.

Cheers,

Rob