I have a number of accounts with DASP and they really *are* superb. One major annoyance I have though (and I think this would be the same with other ASP hosting too) is terrible FTP upload speeds, meaning the site can be offline for some time during updates. I thought the bad FTP speed might just be latency to LA from the UK, but my newer accounts are on the London datacentre and I have similar speeds. I really miss the mechanisms I'd have on a Linux host like rsync, ssh, or FTPing to a temporary directory and then doing a mv on the host to copy it across in one go. Are there any solutions for this, presently available or in the pipeline? It blights an otherwise great service for me! Thanks in advance, John
How big are your files? Typically upload speed is determined by your ISP so you may want to check with your ISP and verify exactly what your upload speed is suppose to be. Unfortunately the features you are asking for is just not available in an IIS platform configured as a shared hosting environment. If we give you a temp folder to upload your site and you want to manually move the files from the temp folder to your root means we will need to give you remote access to the server. As you can see in a shared hosting environment that will not be feasible because of security.
The biggest file I have is 3.6MB (the AjaxControlToolkit.dll). My site is merged to a single DLL that is about 650kB. Generally other files are small, a few bytes or kilobytes. I find on the big files I get at best about 8 or 9kB/s. I find the same from different locations (home and office) with different ISPs, and it's the same to both the US and UK datacentres. I also seem to find that each small file takes several seconds to transfer - presumably because of latency on the FTP connection. I understand what you mean about the differences between the Unix and Windows systems, but could you not, for example, create a shadow FTP directory and then create a button on the control panel that swaps the current and shadow directory contents? This would be cool because you could easily swap them back with a click if you had problems with your upload! Alternatively, how about an interface on the control panel that lets you upload a ZIP file which gets unpacked into your hosting folder? I'm sure there are creative ways to improve the upload experience without reducing security. After all, FTP is definitely *not* secure!
This sounds like a technical nigthmare due to how permissions work on a Windows platform. This will require another folder outside your root and that you have access to that folder. Not to mention all the resource this type of setup may require such as additional hard drive space and added CPU usage with copying and pasting back and forth on the same server. If it is only one account this will be achievable, but obviously if we offer it to one customer it is only morally correctly to offer it to everyone. I can only imagine the load this will have on the server. This is really not feasible especially in a shared hosting environment. Compressed files are sheltered from virus scans and firewalls. So if you pass a zip file through the protection we have set place and allow it to uncompress on the server, what will that say if there is a virus inside those files. Also the uncompress procedure can activate an executable, where as an FTP upload will not. So even if you upload an executable file via FTP it cannot render on the server, where as if you upload it via ZIP uncompress it, it has the potential of activating. Not good I'm afraid..... Let us also not forget the server resource that will be required to uncompress files on the spot. Again if it is only one account, then it maybe OK providing the security issue is not on the table, but if it is everybody.... Well you can guess just how much the CPU usage will increase...
