DiscountASP.net is great--but can I get even more power if I pay for it?

DiscountASP.Net-->What a great site for developers! Who in their right mind would develop anywhere other than here for Visual Studio solutions? You'd have to be crazy! I do have my business website hosted by a Linux outfit (sorry DASP, but their teaser rate for just hosting my simple static HTML page was too low to resist), but all my development is done here. And it will remain that way as long as I continue to get the outstanding service that I've gotten to date. No I don't work here. ;-)

Now I am doing a commercial app and my business partner, also a programmer, wonders whether DASP has enough horsepower for an architecture that will be a SQL Server 2008 database run by web services, all hosted by DASP. I assume him DASP does. He keeps mentioning GoDaddy, but they are too mass market for me and I would never go there. However, just because I promised I'd ask, here is one scenario that I'd like to posit.

Suppose our commercial app (and I assume a personal account such as mine allows commercial traffic? Of course it must) is so successful that we are getting around 1500 hits per second on our SOA / SOAP web services (or REST for that matter--we've not quite decided which web service architecture to use)? At that point, I would imagine that DiscountASP.net would want more money, since we are consuming more of their database bandwidth, no? I do notice DASP has a monthly limit that will likely be exceeded by so many hits, but is there also a daily limit? Here is the info I got from DASP's help files (" Need more Bandwidth? Add Additional Bandwidth Total Bandwidth Usage for selected month : 0.36 MB Current Bandwidth Quota : 81920 MB ")

Also I assume 1500 hits / second is pretty high, but has anybody on one database achieved something even higher? For planning purposes I'd like to know if possible.

Finally, and this is a minor point for our architecture, but as web services do use server memory, I guess if they consume too much server memory there will be throttling, which is standard, but is there a way of paying DASP extra money to get un-throttled? I suspect perhaps Microsoft has a way of favoring some server processes over others, but I'm not sure DASP has it set up to bill customers for this feature.

Keep up the good work DASP.

 

Thank you for your appreciation and support to us

We do support SQL database driven site in our environment presumably there's enough;if not more 'horsepower' to run it. SQL databases are hosted on different servers (yes, multiple servers) than the web site; to optimize performance and stability.

Each hosting account allocated 1GB disk space and 80GB bandwidth traffic, should you need more you can always purchase additional bandwidth.
http://www.discountasp.net/features.aspx#addons

We host each account in its own unique application pool; if the application consumes more memory than allocated, it will recycle instead of throttling.

To conserve memory, we recycle the application if any of the following condition is met

1) More than 20 minutes of idle time (no http request in 20 minutes)
2) The application uses more than 200 MB memory on IIS 7 and 100 MB on IIS 6
3) The application uses more than 70% of CPU time.

Thank you

 

How do you measure disk space and memory?

This might be a silly question, but when you say each hosting account is allocated 1BG disk space, how can I measure this? Is it as trivial as checking out how much data is stored in each of the folders that hang off the root directory of your account as DASP?

Likewise for 200 MB memory in IIS 7--is this nothing more than the memory being used by your program as reported by Task Manager in Windows for example?

Thanks,

PJ

Thank you for your appreciation and support to us

We do support SQL database driven site in our environment presumably there's enough;if not more 'horsepower' to run it. SQL databases are hosted on different servers (yes, multiple servers) than the web site; to optimize performance and stability.

Each hosting account allocated 1GB disk space and 80GB bandwidth traffic, should you need more you can always purchase additional bandwidth.
http://www.discountasp.net/features.aspx#addons

We host each account in its own unique application pool; if the application consumes more memory than allocated, it will recycle instead of throttling.

To conserve memory, we recycle the application if any of the following condition is met

1) More than 20 minutes of idle time (no http request in 20 minutes)
2) The application uses more than 200 MB memory on IIS 7 and 100 MB on IIS 6
3) The application uses more than 70% of CPU time.

 

The disk space is measured by how much data you stored in the server (FTP) email and database space are counted separate against the total disk space. You can simply FTP to your site and see the total usage or use the 'usage summary' feature in the control panel which will show you disk space and bandwidth usage for the account
https://my.discountasp.net/usage-summary.aspx

Since we host each account in its own unique application pool, the memory limit of 200MB(app pool identity) is dedicated for your account only; This reflects the application pool memory of IIS7.

One hosting account == one application pool

 

Some more questions, no rush, but curious as to the SQL Server max transactions rate

So I have these big dreams for this app I'm writing--it's very promising on paper.

It uses a SQL Server database that serves up web methods. If a lot of users ping the server, I could split up the database so that two or more databases share the load, since I know the IP address of the user and it's easy to construct a web method to direct the incoming message to a different server depending on what the IP address of the client is.

But, before I do that, I have to know what is the realistic maximum user limit for a SQL Server 2008 database? Scouring the net, I found nothing but an interesting advertisement that said "1500 hits per second is no problem with MS SQL Server 2008"--which implies that's an impressive number.

Is this a realistic maximum number, 1500 a second? And if so, how much server memory would that take, roughly? I guess it depends on what transactions are being done in each of those hits, so let's assume it's just a small creation of some object with say 600 bytes = 4.8kbits, so it's 1500x4.8kb = ~8MB on average so I am OK with server memory--correct me if I'm wrong.

But any insight as to the maximum (real world realistic) database hit rate would be appreciated.

 

Followup question: how does DASP do scaling?

I have a followup question that's important:

suppose i am getting too many hits and going above my contract bandwidth limits.

Does DASP add something in the background to give me more bandwidth? Or do I have to do something like write my app differently to take advantage of another database, or use parallel threads?

My app is going to be stateless Per Call and a REST model, meaning it should be very scaleable. So in theory DASP can add more databases to a 'pool' of databases that handles my incoming calls to my SQL Server 2008 web methods, correct?

I'm not a database backend person--I just know how to write SQL queries--so perhaps somebody can explain how DASP expands a user's bandwidth if the user pays more money. Note I'm not talking about buying another database.

 

There is not a technical limit on the bandwidth your account can use. It is a soft quota, so when you go over - actually, when you get to 85% of your quota - you'll receive email notices. If you go over, billing will contact you and let you know estimated costs and ask you if you wish to add more bandwidth to your quota.

We never shut down access to a site for bandwidth overages unless someone is unresponsive when they exceed the limits.

I'm afraid that's impossible to estimate,there are far too many variables.

 

My followup question?

Can you also please answer the followup question? If I want more bandwidth, what happens at the backend? Repeated below.

UPDATE: I did a little research and found this is a hard problem. See this thread here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3836395/does-any-rdbms-do-auto-scaling-sharding-re-balancing

Automatically scaling and re-balancing a database is therefore difficult. However, if anybody at DASP can speak to this issue, and to what they do (or what vendors that DASP buys from claim to do) it would be useful.

PJ

I have a followup question that's important:

suppose i am getting too many hits and going above my contract bandwidth limits.

Does DASP add something in the background to give me more bandwidth? Or do I have to do something like write my app differently to take advantage of another database, or use parallel threads?

My app is going to be stateless Per Call and a REST model, meaning it should be very scaleable. So in theory DASP can add more databases to a 'pool' of databases that handles my incoming calls to my SQL Server 2008 web methods, correct?

I'm not a database backend person--I just know how to write SQL queries--so perhaps somebody can explain how DASP expands a user's bandwidth if the user pays more money. Note I'm not talking about buying another database.