Info Any experience with windows server virtual or physical hosting?

YuliApp

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Dec 27, 2017
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Hello,
does anyone have any practical experience with windows server hosting different than Azure?
Prefferably physical hardware hosting?
TIA, Yulia
 

YuliApp

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Dec 27, 2017
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Ok the question was maybe too vague, i meant share where and with whom and your experience...
I made few and was 50/50 happy and not. Looking prefferably for windows cloud hosting, similar to 1&1 but without the 1&1 experience.
I find azure working really good, but is too expensive
 

manly

Lifer
Jan 25, 2000
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Why a dedicated server? I haven't looked in a while, but have you checked out DigitalOcean?
 
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YuliApp

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Why a dedicated server? I haven't looked in a while, but have you checked out DigitalOcean?
I preffer to have control over the whole machine and IIS, not just ASP + SQL hosting

never hear of DigitalOcean, first hand experience? Their single page website doesnt build really lot of trust
 

manly

Lifer
Jan 25, 2000
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I preffer to have control over the whole machine and IIS, not just ASP + SQL hosting

never hear of DigitalOcean, first hand experience? Their single page website doesnt build really lot of trust
I used to work for a small Cloud hosting company. DO is very popular with developers, but I haven't personally used it.

You don't need a physical server, just a virtual machine. DigitalOcean calls them droplets. Basically you want an IaaS VM instead of a PaaS service such as Azure Web Apps.
 

YuliApp

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I used to work for a small Cloud hosting company. DO is very popular with developers, but I haven't personally used it.

You don't need a physical server, just a virtual machine. DigitalOcean calls them droplets. Basically you want an IaaS VM instead of a PaaS service such as Azure Web Apps.
Yes i am aware of that, either VM or physical machine would be ok for me. Atm i am using co-hosted physical machine (s) and VM in Azure, but looking for something cheaper and at best cloud-like scallable.

I will look at the DO, thank you.

EDIT: i tried to register and got stuck in endless captcha loop, so that is it for me.
 

YuliApp

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DO is pretty solid. We also do VPS hosting at madgenius if you need something :).
Sadly the MadGenius is way too expensive and offers little storage. I came to 45 dollars with 1 IP, 2CPU and 35GB space. This is even more than twice the price of Azure. But thank you for letting me know. Always good to know more services, especially close to the community.
 
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manly

Lifer
Jan 25, 2000
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I will give it a try. I wanted to try DO, but it won't let me register so... When already this part is broken, i do not trust them.
I can't speak to your difficulty, but DO is a very established mid-sized provider.

Here are more options you can look at:
 
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YuliApp

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I can't speak to your difficulty, but DO is a very established mid-sized provider.

Here are more options you can look at:

Thank you, but seeing those options i think that either EVERY customer spends a lot of money on webhosting (probably startups without real admin?) or that i should be happy with what i have now.

I know AWS is price/performance the best, but i hate amazon so, i wont use them. Azure ended #3, which for me is the only option now, still too expensive. Love their storage deals though. For someone needing to backup 100s of TBs they are godsend.
 

YuliApp

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That just means your expectations don't lineup with reality.

It depends. You can buy server for 1000€, slap it for 5 years on colocation 20€ per month and you are already in profit against any kind of cloud. The fact alone is rather sad indicator that there are many companies avoiding paying administrators and therefor raising price of cloud up. Cheap labor and all that.

I am happy with my actual price / performance, i am just shopping around before new upgrade cycle.
 

sdifox

No Lifer
Sep 30, 2005
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It depends. You can buy server for 1000€, slap it for 5 years on colocation 20€ per month and you are already in profit against any kind of cloud. The fact alone is rather sad indicator that there are many companies avoiding paying administrators and therefor raising price of cloud up. Cheap labor and all that.

I am happy with my actual price / performance, i am just shopping around before new upgrade cycle.

Then go ahead and do that. You are missing OS and support cost though.
 

YuliApp

Senior member
Dec 27, 2017
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Then go ahead and do that. You are missing OS and support cost though.
Ok, i will just repeat what i mean. Imho cloud hosting should be cheaper than cohosting or physical hardware hosting. If i can get 90$ 1,5TB drive with windows on a physical host (https://www.ionos.de/server-configuration) then there should be way to get the cloud cheaper already by a principle it self.
You might disagree, but it makes sense. Especially big farms like Azure or by companies who focus on virtual hosting.
 

sdifox

No Lifer
Sep 30, 2005
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Ok, i will just repeat what i mean. Imho cloud hosting should be cheaper than cohosting or physical hardware hosting. If i can get 90$ 1,5TB drive with windows on a physical host (https://www.ionos.de/server-configuration) then there should be way to get the cloud cheaper already by a principle it self.
You might disagree, but it makes sense. Especially big farms like Azure or by companies who focus on virtual hosting.
Capitalism 101, charge what people are willing to pay. A lot of people don't want the headache of hardware maintenance.
 
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manly

Lifer
Jan 25, 2000
10,907
2,058
126
Ok, i will just repeat what i mean. Imho cloud hosting should be cheaper than cohosting or physical hardware hosting. If i can get 90$ 1,5TB drive with windows on a physical host (https://www.ionos.de/server-configuration) then there should be way to get the cloud cheaper already by a principle it self.
You might disagree, but it makes sense. Especially big farms like Azure or by companies who focus on virtual hosting.
20€ is really cheap for colocation IMO. Cloud hosting isn't primarily about cost savings. It's more about agility, high availability, rich features, and offloading maintenance to the provider. Like sdifox said, commodity hardware does fail so you can't compare a single physical server to a public cloud. I'm not a sexy CEO ;), but most businesses these days are better served with Cloud hosting. Although it seems like AWS and Azure have fat profit margins in their income statements, I know from experience it's a competitive industry with way too many players worldwide. DigitalOcean and Linode cut hourly rates drastically about 5 years ago, and I'm not sure how they make profits, if at all. The good news for the successful providers is that you can pack a LOT of tenants/instances onto a single physical host. The bad news is that x86 servers depreciate to 0 over a number of a years, so you need massive economies of scale to compete.

To state the obvious, cloud computing services are intended for business use. That includes sole proprietors such as independent software devs. So the costs are very fair IMHO, and you can control the costs. There is essentially no demand for cloud computing by consumers, because they have plenty of free/cheap SaaS platforms to post personal content. Such as social networks, blogging or whatever people like to do these days.
 
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YuliApp

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20€ is really cheap for colocation IMO. Cloud hosting isn't primarily about cost savings. It's more about agility, high availability, rich features, and offloading maintenance to the provider. Like sdifox said, commodity hardware does fail so you can't compare a single physical server to a public cloud. I'm not a sexy CEO ;), but most businesses these days are better served with Cloud hosting. Although it seems like AWS and Azure have fat profit margins in their income statements, I know from experience it's a competitive industry with way too many players worldwide. DigitalOcean and Linode cut hourly rates drastically about 5 years ago, and I'm not sure how they make profits, if at all. The good news for the successful providers is that you can pack a LOT of tenants/instances onto a single physical host. The bad news is that x86 servers depreciate to 0 over a number of a years, so you need massive economies of scale to compete.

To state the obvious, cloud computing services are intended for business use. That includes sole proprietors such as independent software devs. So the costs are very fair IMHO, and you can control the costs. There is essentially no demand for cloud computing by consumers, because they have plenty of free/cheap SaaS platforms to post personal content. Such as social networks, blogging or whatever people like to do these days.

Thank you for elaborate answer. Yes, i am aware that purpose of the cloud is not really to save money, but was kind of hoping to market evolve as i was last time shopping around 3-4 years maybe ago. Disparity is still TOO high, sadly.

When i sit down and add an employee to the costs, then already cloud looks cheap (which is kind of sad), so believe me i am not insane, i am well aware of the thin margin others operate.

Still all my colocated servers were without touching the hardware running over 5 years, and well, even by experience with desktops - PCs are very reliable nowadays so yes i am definitely sure that there is a money to be make while being cheaper than Azure/AWS. I was cheapkate back then, now not so anymore, but still trying to find a sense in it - best way to go.

As for me, cloud would be better option exactly for all the reasons you mentioned, while i didnt had a hardware failure affecting me (one HDD swap was all), i could create the VMS better than shopping for hardware (for example try to find high storage system without being at the same time also power overkill - few years ago ATOM from supermicro was all the rage, now all is xeon with 8 cores) and i want more free time. it is lot of effort to keep them running even when they are reliable.
 

YuliApp

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Dec 27, 2017
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Hello,

When we are looking for a web hosting provider some important things need to be considered like, what features they provide, the cost of the plans as compare to others, customer reviews, etc.
These are some important things, once you get all positive answers about these things, you can choose them as your future hosting provider. For more details on web hosting services, please eukhost and initiate a live chat.

Thank you. Looks really good, prices and such. However your website is not really compliant, missing for example GDPR information? Or where the datacenter sits? I have very few users in UK so would preffer something closer to Central EU or US.

I will look around if you have some options for attached storage to those VPSes and might give it a try.
 

YuliApp

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Dec 27, 2017
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Just wanted to share a little update, so this thread has some finish.
I ended up with azure virtual datacenter server 2019 and a bit of coding so i can switch blobs to archive when users are not longer using them.
This gave me fairly good performance server, "endless space" for probably the lowest money.