

Ask HN: Managed Hosting Service Recommendation for Windows environment - desigooner

We are currently using a .NET / DotNetNuke based product that runs on Windows 2008 / IIS 6 / MS SQL Server 2005.  Currently, it is hosted in-house but due to resource issues, we plan to move the web infrastructure to a 3rd party provider.<p>I was wondering if anyone had recommendations for a Windows/.NET Managed Hosting Service Provider. Also, would it be a good idea to look at Cloud services providers? We need a provider with a solid track record as far as security of data and data availability are concerned as we do store confidential information like SSNs and handle payments.<p>Thanks.
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LeBlanc
Given that you are running your servers in house, your best bet is probably
not to use a managed hosting solution, but rather something like Amazon EC2
(for windows) or Linode (for linux). Back in the spring I was looking for a
managed hosting solution for a small .NET project and the best I could find
was GoDaddy which ended up being a terrible experience as you might expect. If
you get an EC2 server, it should be fairly easy to port your current setup to
Amazon's cloud since you will have root access. I'm running my linux servers
on a Linode right now and I love it.

<http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/>

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brudgers
Pardon my ignorance, what are the concerns about Godaddy?

How do they relate to price of service?

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justrudd
I've never used a 3rd party vendor for this. I've used ServerBeach, Rackspace,
etc. But it was always with my hardware sitting on their network.

Regardless, be very careful when choosing your 3rd party vendor because of PII
laws. Some 3rd party hosts won't allow you to store PII on their hardware. You
can use their network (i.e. colo), but they won't manage the hardware for you
because they'd then have theoretical access to that data.

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desigooner
To be a bit more specific as to what our needs are, we have a database server
and a front end / business logic server (times 2, 1 instance for production
and 1 for development). I might have bungled up in saying Managed hosting but
what I meant was dedicated hardware with full access or probably a cloud
setup.

