ARRHG!

It's the same brick wall I hit every time. Hosting...

I currently have a package with PowerDNN. Excellent, fast, amazing, but expensive. I'm paying $20/month for a single website (although I did put 3 related sites on one installation using parent portals).

However I need to add 3 more sites. I started creating sites as a hobby, but its now branching out into a second income. I have three more sites to develop and upload and need a provider. My requirements are:

4x SQL 2005 databases
4x Domains - I'll be installing 4x DotNetNuke websites
ASP.NET 2.0 (3.5 would be better)
Each site requires no more than 200MB
Each site will have relatively low bandwidth
I must be able to access MSSQL databases via management studio express
It *must* be fast. I cannot stand slow webhosts.

The database/installation requirements are bound to increase in the future, but I really don't need all these lame extras like MySQL databases, Sitebuilder (What is that?) etc.. Nor do I need 100Terrabytes of disk space, just 200MB per domain would be fine thanks!

So far I've tried:

IHostASP - 30 second page loads. Slow ...
Seekdotnet - Slow databases and buggy control panel.
PowerDNN - Excellent on all fronts, but too expensive for my requirements
GoDaddy - rubbish!!!

Try navigating to www.stephenwebster.net. This is on seekdotnet and I think its unacceptably slow (and NukeSyndicate doesnt seem to work on the compositions page).

Similarly, try www.rockrhymereason.org.uk. This is a graphically intensive site, but blasts along on powerdnn's amazing, but expensive servers.

Honestly, I'm so fed up with this. How hard is it to give someone a decent, fast ASP.NET/SQL hosting package without charging a mint?

Anyway *ahem* end rant. Sorry, I'm a bit fed up!

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Wait - I may have found the issue with my SeekDotNet hosting.

I'm using NukeSyndicate to do podcasting (Lee, I must confess my subscriptions expired so I can't watch your NewsArticles to Podcast video! ... I'll be renewing soon as I want to watch Fck Editor videos too.) There seems to be a compatibility issue with NukeSyndicate and Seekdotnet.

Here:
http://www.stephenwebster.net/Compo...fault.aspx

This page takes a whopping 20 seconds to load before throwing an exception (probably a SQL Server timeout). All other pages don't take long to show at all - click around (not much to see).

I had created a "Latest Podcasts" module by hijacking some of the code from NukeSyndicate - this was shown on every page. I've since deleted it from all pages and they're much faster now.

So ... After my raging rant, it appears SeekDotNet isn't that bad after all :o But I have a SQL Server permissions error. Anyone know how to resolve it?

I have a SeekDotNet hosting site.  They are pretty good.  Support seems to be lacking occasionally, but they've always solved my problems.

It's possible that you've got a very large event log and that is what is timing out.

Try this.  Go to the SQL page under Host Settings and execute this query:

TRUNCATE TABLE EVENTLOG

See if that helps ...

You might want to take a look at this first: Introduction to SQL Queries with SQL Server Express, DotNetNuke and Vista

Hello,

And to keep on top of your logs from getting too large have a look at:
Site logs, Event logs and Scheduler

You may want to first of all test NukeSyndicate with 1 RSS feed and check performance and then check your cache settings for each feed - add 1 feed at a time and check it is still working ok. I find that the page needs to be regulalry visited to stop the slow initial load up of the RSS feeds - so may be worth using an auto ping service for the page every 10mins.

Hah, It was not even a permissions error. I created a blank site on seekdotnet and installed nukesyndicate - worked just fine.

So I restored the remote database again from my localhost installation, still had the same problem.

Finally I logged onto my localhost site and the problem was there too! When you create a database in seekdotnet, they change the database name to prepend it with your client ID, so it becomes C4566_YourDatabase. When I uploaded I changed the connection string in web.config to reflect the new name, but forgot to change the connection string under appSettings, which NukeSyndicate relies on.

So there you have it. One line of XML changed and the site works fine. I've got the site www.stephenwebster.net running on SQL Express since its such a small site, and its not in the slightest bit laggy.

I take it all back, Seekdotnet is not rubbish, its my web-admin skills! ...

Well glad to hear you got it sorted! The site does seem slow when navigating between the pages though.

Do you reckon? I thought it was just me being impatient.

I've got it on SQLExpress. I'm sure it will be faster with full-fat SQL 2005, but since seekdotnet only give you 3 SQL-2005 databases with their 6-domain reseller package, someone's got to get relegated to Express ...

Compared to www.rockrhymereason.org.uk it is a bit slow (that's hosted on PowerDNN). Perhaps I will try a few things (such as installing Page blaster) to speed it up. Oh and I've got the Yahoo Media player running on it as a script - on every page. Perhaps if I move the initialisation to the end of the page it will improve performance.

Yes would be worth doing those changes, anything to squeeze some more performance out will always help.