I'm writing to inquire about the availability of a deployment slot feature similar to what Microsoft Azure offers. As an ASP.NET developer, I find this feature incredibly useful for managing deployments and ensuring a seamless transition between updates. With deployment slots, I can deploy my application to a separate environment (slot) alongside the live production site. This allows me to thoroughly test and validate the new deployment before making it live. Once I've confirmed everything is working correctly in the deployment slot, I can then switch the live site to the newly deployed slot with minimal downtime. The ability to maintain a separate non-live slot alongside the live site is invaluable. It enables me to: Test new deployments extensively without impacting the live site. Quickly roll back to the previous stable version if any issues arise. Minimize downtime during deployments by switching between slots. Maintain a staging environment for testing and quality assurance. If this deployment slot feature is not currently available, I would greatly appreciate it if you could consider adding it to your service offerings. It would significantly enhance the deployment process for ASP.NET applications and provide a more robust and reliable way to manage updates. Thank you for your time and consideration. I look forward to hearing back from you regarding the availability or potential implementation of this feature. Best regards, Wayne Eastaugh
Thanks for the feedback. This staging feature is not something we would add to our shared hosting platform at DiscountASP.NET. However, over at our sister hosting company, Everleap.com, we do offer a Multi-Site Plan. The Multi-site plan comes with 5 sites, and each site is hosted in their own isolated application pool. You can use one site as your production site. You can use another site as your staging and even use another site as your development site. The workflow for deploying your updated site would be different from Azure though.
Hi Takeshi, Thanks for getting back to me on this. You say, 'The workflow for deploying your updated site would be different from Azure though' Can you explain what the workflow would be? I'm particularly interested in minimising the downtime when deploying updates. Would there be a mechanism to swap the incoming traffic between two sites? Thanks, Wayne
Also, what is the migration procedure to move my existing discountasp website, SQL Server db, SSL and email accounts to an Everleap multi-site plan?
Migration: Our tech support can migrate your site for you. Contact them and they can assist. Azure Slots: We haven't looked at it recently, so I don't know if it changed. From my understanding, if you are using this feature on Azure, you deploy your new updates to production by swapping the IP of your current production site to the updated site. One of the issues with this approach would be that you have to be very careful to make sure your deploying any new updates to the correct location. For example, if you updated your site and start working on new changes, if you don't change the location in your FTP client or Visual Studio, your old settings will update your production site. Everleap: With the Everleap multi-site plan, you get 5 isolated sites. So you can bind your domain to one site as your production site. Another site can be used for your staging/development. These sites will not change in purpose. You do your work on your staging/dev site and you can view the updates using the secondary URL we provide. You can either use your production SQL database with your staging/dev site or create another test SQL database. That's up to you. Once you are happy with any new development work in your staging/dev site, then you would deploy the new changes to your production site. To do this, you can download your staging/dev site and then deploy the whole thing to your production site. Or if you have a change log of the files you touched, then you can download and upload the changed files. Hope that makes sense.
