I have a client that is paying $1500 per month for hosting of 1 website (1 domain name, email is hosted elsewhere). The website is pretty low traffic. Like, 100 unique visitors a week. The only catch (and why it is so expensive) is that their database is 15 GB, and is replicated from the hosting company to inside my small companies office.
Inside the office, there is a desktop application that hits the internal database quite a bit. From the website, some data is entered into THAT version of the database. Replication keeps both databases in synch on a schedule of every 5 minutes.
My client has a T1 that runs into their office. I want to knock out the hosting provider altogether, host their website from a server they already have (more than capable of handling this website), and dump the replication altogether. This would save them $1500 per month, and for a company of 5, it would really make a difference to them.
Assuming I already have a backup strategy in place (way to move a copy of the DB offsite every day), what are the problems with this?
Support? they can reboot their server as easily as the hosting provider can.
What if server goes down for good? There is a duplicate that I can bring up in a couple of hours, and that is all the level of service they really require.
What am I missing here? I want to save them money, but I don't want to screw them over...
EDIT: Some of the answers and comments make it clear that I myself wasn't clear. My client (company A, not a hosting provider) is paying company B to host their website. The website has a database (MS SQL Server 2000) that is 15 GB. That SQL Server DB is being replicated back to a server # company A.
Company B is charging Company A $1500 per month for this service.
Company A already has a T1 for connectivity to the internet. They are located inside of a run of the mill business park.
I am proposing doing away with any outside hosting, getting a DNS provider to point the website to Company A's static IP and hosting the website on a server inside Company A. Then there would be no need for any replication at all, and they wouldn't be paying company B $1500 per month.
I hope that explains it. I'm going to re-read and comment on all the current answers.
Really, any advice is very appreciated.
Sounds to me like your only risk in moving the server in-house is if your T1 goes down. If you have a backup strategy in place for that, go for it.
The other option is to co-loc your own server with your own SQL Server licence on it. Hosting companies charge a lot for hosting SQL Server databases because they have to pay per-CPU licencing for it. So they build up a powerful server to serve lots of client's databases, but then SQL Server offers no way to do useage accounting so they only way they can bill/screw you is on database size.
Sounds like the traffic is low enough on your site you can get a dual core server, a 1 CPU licence of SQL Server for a one-off cost of a few thousand dollars and then you're only paying the monthly co-loc price.
A hosting provider can monitor the server 24x7. What if the server crashes at 8 pm? I the people at the small company are not working around the clock?
Depends on the service this DB is providing. What are the requirements to its uptime?
Database replication isn;t that expensive for bandwidth - well, assuming you're not doing a hotcopy of the entire DB files across the link that is.
Check out log shipping, or any of the supported replication options that will replicate the DB using minimal bandwidth. (you never said what the DB was, so I can't comment further there)
I would move to the new server and keep replication. At the very least, if you're really worried about data loss, then get another server in the same facility and copy across to that one - even if you copy 15Gb every 5 minutes, it'll be using non-chargeable bandwidth without even going outside the switch they're connected to.
Related
I'm thinking of moving about 5 websites over to be hosted on Github pages from a dedicated host. They will all be converted to static websites. The domain names will still be managed there, what are some options for email hosting cheaply or at all?
I've always gone with Google's G Suite.
The basic plan gives 30GB of storage, and costs $5/User/Month
The business plan gives Unlimited storage, a few more features, and costs $10/User/Month
There's also an enterprise plan, but I don't think you'd need it.
I've noticed on my dev env. timeout sql connection errors when i'm using connection string to remote db.
I've developed a small tool to ping domain and db server based on these answers test if a website is alive from a C# applicaiton
and test SQL Server connection programmatically
When i noticed Failed pings i looked into site management console and caught that Sql Server is unavailable, the site was down for about 5 minutes.
Since i started monitoring the issue repeated 3 times for the last couple of days. It means that my DB server withing a shared hosting plan is not reliable 24/7, i opened a ticket and got a reply from support:
As this is a shared server, the activities on the server always varies from time to time. We apologize if there is a slight issue earlier
Is this a common situation for any shared asp.net hosting? or it is a bad luck and i need to search for another hosting?
Sometimes when the hosting providers update some service or software it could be down for a few minutes, but this should not happen very often. You could continue monitor the services and if the results are not good you could try another hosting provider.
You may experience little slowness or lagging in I/O in shared database servers while database backup script is running in background or any other maintenance are carried out by the web host. But in most cases, they don't affect the server availability.
In fact, shared database servers are really high end servers (mostly SSD base) and are meant to host thousands of databases without single hiccup. They must be capable to handle millions of queries at any point of time. If you face this problem more often then it's straight indication that your web host is overly utilizing the database server resources, or server is no longer capable to handle the load in peak hours.
I have a MS Access Database that I need to share with multiple users in the entire state. Right now I split the database and placed the backend on a shared network drive and distributed the front end, but the issue I'm having is that offices further away can't enter a record in a timely manner (one office took over 2 hours).
We do have SharePoint, but it's on a 2010 server and our MS Access is 2013 and I'm told because of this, access won't link up to SharePoint and this is not an option.
Someone in my office mentioned something about replicating a database...is this something that will work? If not, are there any suggestions?
Replication in Access was killed in Access 2007.
SharePoint is not an option except if you start from scratch, and the shared lists and/or various web apps you can create are seriously limited compared to your present desktop solution.
Basically, you have three options:
Upgrade your WAN to 100 Mbit/s low-latency quality fibre connection
Create a Terminal Server hosting your application. Remote users will access this via standard Remote Desktop Connection
Upgrade your backend to SQL Server Express (free) and set up an in-house or outsourced server hosting this
The first options require zero coding, while the last takes a little but not much, and that is well documentated (just bing/google on this).
If I have a website, hosted with a standard hosting company, and I would like to move it to a Dedicated machine, maybe EC2, is there a way to compare my current traffic to usage of a cloud machine?
Hosting companies gives you plan measured in Bandwith/Space while EC2 in usage time.
So I'm looking for a way to predict machine usage time based on my current traffic data for costs evaluation.
Thanx!
I'm not sure you're understanding usage time correctly. For your website to exist on EC2, you'll need to create one or more instances depending on the architecture you use. This is the same as a dedicated hosting setup elsewhere except with cloud instances.
The difference lies with billing. Where a traditional hosting company will charge you monthly, EC2 charges you per instance hour, or every hour you have an instance running. Therefore, for hosting a website, you'll have the server running 24/7 which will equate to roughly 720 hrs a month charged at a few cents per hour.
The key thing to work out is how many/what size instances you'll need to run your site at the equivalent performance you're seeing now, and that's only something you'll figure out with testing.
My startup is located in Europe where most of our current users are.
I'm looking for a host that will allow us to scale to the US and Asia without latency taking its toll on performance.
Does the cloud solve the distance = latency problem?
If not, Where would be the ideal hosting location for a growing startup?
Some data:
Asp.net 3.5
SQL 2005
Jquery (lots of Ajax)
MVC
Thanks
The Cloud is just an abstraction. It doesn't affect the underlying physical nature of the servers running your code and hosting your data. If the systems storing your data are a long way from your users there will some latency, no matter how you access them.
Most Cloud providers allow you to choose where you want your data - for example, Amazon S3 lets you choose to store your data in either the US or Europe - but no provider is going to be able to magically store all your data in multiple locations simultaneously.
If you want the benefit of multiple data centres you'd have to allow simultaneous updates at each location and there is no way to synchronise such updates without knowledge of the business logic of the application, so you're going to have to write some code to do this.
You're still going to have a look at what each Cloud provider offers and work out how each can help solve your problems, but you're going to have to do some work yourself.
What you're looking is CDN (Content Delivery Network) hosting for Windows Applications. In CDN, your content is cached on various POP's located across the continents. So, if a request is coming from India, cached copy of content stored on Indian POP is served. The same is the case for US, EU and other continent clients.
This technology is still in early phase of development and there are two types of CDN technology - PUSH & PULL. PUSH means content is immediately PUSHED to POP's when there is any change on Master server and PULL means POP servers are pulling content at regular interval from Master server and this interval is usually 12 hours to 24 hours.
If your site is database driven and frequently updated, PUSH technology CDN will be the right choice.