I have a site hosted with you but is for personal use only, I don't want to pay $10 monthfor the SQL Server 2005 addon. I want to migrate to ASP.net 2.0 and use the Personal WebSite Starter Kit. May be you can create a plan to support SQL Server Express at a lower cost Regards
I second this motion. SQL Express was built for low cost solution such as this. I would like to see discountasp support this feature.
sql 2005 express is designed to be a desktop engine. it is not meant to be used in full production environment. There are many restriction w/ sql express, eg. single CPU supprt only, limited memory and database size. it may be a cheap solution but we do not want to you guys to come back and tell us the db is not performing. Bruce DiscountASP.NET www.DiscountASP.NET
Hello Bruce, thanks for your answer I used Dotnet Nuke before (with asp 1.1) usingan access DB, and for my site it was fine, now I developed a new portal with the personal website starter kit, and I think withSQLExpress is sufficient for my purposes. May be can be an SQL 2005 option with less size, for example 50MB, at half of the cost. Regards
Personally, as my Web site is a personal "enthusiast" site and most definatley not for high volume, for me, I most certinally only want a super simple, low volume, database. I would rather not have to use access! I basically want a replacement for Access (which is a simple, low volume, database).
There are a lot of technical reasons why we do not support SQL express. SQL express will spawn a instance of SQL server for each application pool. In our testing environment, each SQLServer process (even at idle) will take up 80MB of memory, the average memory usage is about 300MB depending on the database content. See for yourself by pulling up the task manager on your machine. Imagine if 50 people on the server uses SQL express, we will need 15G of memory to support it. Well, you all probably know that this is impractical. In general, we also want to seperate the SQL server and the web server in a different server to properly secure the data. Bruce DiscountASP.NET www.DiscountASP.NET
I have no idea what the average DiscountASP customer is, but I'd be willing to bet most are enthusiats with personal websites. I think you couldalleviate the SQL Expressissue and make more money by offering the following:25MB at $3/month and 50MB at $5/month (similar to the MySQL option) I'd sign up the daythis isoffered and think many others would too. -Paul Post Edited (Paul Daly) : 11/22/2005 8:34:32 PM GMT
This thread demonstrates the growing frustration of users who want to use the ASP .NET 2.0 Providers for application that need the provider functionality but who do not have heavy usage. When MS withdrew the Access Providers, they stated that SQL Express would be the replacement. This is not going to happen however due to the issues outlined in the thread. So what is needed is either a more finely tiered pricing structure (as outlined by others) or a resurrection of the Access Providers. I hope you folks at discount Asp.net help us out here with some creative solutions. I have been looking at many different hosting sites and no one has a good solution yet. Thanks for listening ... bill burrows [MVP]
I agree the needed of a cheapest solution for personal web sites. Hope DiscountAsp can find any way for us. I'm happy with .NET 2.0 Express and SQL Server 2005 Express and when I try to host my personal web site I'am very upset for pricing (I already bought a SQL Server2005 hosting) and for difficults to export ASPNETDB.mdf to it. Thank your very much in advance for your support!
I totally agreed on you guys frustration!! We are very frustrated as well by the fact that MS has never made it clear on this issue. We get question about SQL Express on a daily basis!! According to what I understand, you can still use the Access provider. Though not technically supported, I think you can still download and use the Access Provider. I have not tested it though. Bruce DiscountASP.NET www.DiscountASP.NET
http://www.vwdhosting.net/ is a little 30-day only trial thing Microsoft seems to have arranged for. If they have figured out how to host thousands of SQL Server Express sites you can too. Ask Microsoft.
Hi Richard, The site you reference does not support SQL Express either. The FAQ states: Please note that SQLExpress isn't supported. So if your connection string contains connection to the local SQLExpress instance ( "Data Source=.\SQLExpress;Integrated Security=True;User Instance=True;AttachDBFilename=|DataDirectory|DATABASENAME.mdf" ) you should attach your database to the Sql Server at the hosting and then update connection string with the string provided at the Basic options page of your hosting account (for example the connection string to the Sql Server at hosting will looks like that one: "data source='sql1.vwdhosting.net,1435';User ID='Test-5';Password=**********;database='Test-5'"). The problems outlined earlier in this thread regarding SQL Express and hosting are real and not imaginary. I believe there were some technical issues that they did not anticipate when they first announced SQLExpress and decided to withdraw the Access Provider. MS has not done a good job of making this known to the user community but they are working the problem. The real solution is the "Upsize Tool" discussed in another thread on this forum. I understand that this tool will be available to hosting companies this week (beta) and hopefully will be made available soon on DiscountAsp.net. bill Bill Burrows MS MVP Academic
Richard, We know some hosting companies are offering this. However, many hosters out there are not very responsible and do not understand the remifications of offering a feature. I've personally seen some host putting asp.net 2.0 framework early beta on their production server. Our belief is that we do not want to offer anything that we are not absolutely sure and server uptime / performance is out utmost priority. I bet you can't find any high end windows hoster doing this at this stage. As stated in my previous post, there are 2 problems w/ SQL express (that we know of) 1) It spins up a new SQL process with each unique Application Pool which can cause memory problem 2) If the hoster uses a shared application pool, you run into a security issue because SQL Express do not have a notion of user permission. We are talking to our MSFT contact to see what they recommend. William: We are talking to Scott to see if we can get a hand on that tool before it is released. Bruce DiscountASP.NET www.DiscountASP.NET
