Marketing Ninja » Web Hosting

DiscountASP.NET Removes Community Server Advertisements

Aaronontheweb — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 20:12:20 +0000

I wrote a few weeks ago about how DiscountASP.NET and Community Server don’t mix as a result of some of DiscountASP.NET’s memory management limits and the naturally memory footprint of Community Server 2007.

Eric, a representative from DiscountASP.NET’s marketing department left a comment on my previous entry with the following information:

The older versions of CS used to work on our hosting system. From my understanding, when CS 2007 came out we tested it and it worked on our system. Our tech team re-tested the latest CS2007 version and the base install does hit the high memory usage limit - so we took down all content about CS on our website.

My Thoughts:

I’m glad that DiscountASP.NET took me and other customers’ complaints seriously and decided to test Community Server 2007 again on their servers, confirming what we customers had already found out the hard way. I didn’t appreciate being told “no, you’re wrong; the base installation of CS2007 works fine on our servers and you’ve probably done something to yours” when I emailed customer service, but I’m pleased that they eventually got around to testing CS2007 again.

Removing the CS2007-related copy is the right thing to do also, given that CS2007 conflicts with DiscountASP.NET’s 100 megabyte app pool policy. Score 1 for the customers.

DiscountASP.NET and Community Server do not mix, despite what DiscountASP.NET advertises

Aaronontheweb — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 02:09:26 +0000

I’ve written before about how much I enjoy being a DiscountASP.NET customer for the past three years and I still have a DiscountASP.NET affiliate banner sitting at the bottom of AjaxNinja.

I have a new project that I’m working on and I had decided to give Community Server 2007 a try on a DiscountASP.NET shared account, namely because I needed Community Server’s content mirroring features.

Some misleading DiscountASP.NET advertising

DiscountASP.NET has an entire page dedicated to advertising its compatibility with Community Server 2007, which is what I had read when I signed up for an additional account. The copy for the page reads:

DiscountASP.NET ASP.NET hosting is compatible with the award-winning TelligentSystems Community Server knowledge management and collaboration application.

I assumed this meant:

I’d be able to install and deploy community server per DiscountASP.NET’s specific CS 2007 installation instructions and
I’d be able to use the functionality Community Server 2007 with no strings attached, given that it’s “compatible” with DiscountASP.NET hosting.

Where I got it wrong

Unfortunately, what DiscountASP.NET does not tell you is that due to Community Server 2007’s large memory footprint (~100 megabytes with little to no activity), DiscountASP.NET has to recycle the application pool frequently, sometimes as often as every 5 minutes. The DiscountASP.NET policy is to recycle an individual website’s entire pool once it reaches a size of 100 megabytes.

Here are the consequences of being forced to recycle the application pool on a CS 2007 server:

All logged-in users are logged out;
any posts that you may have been writing will be lost if you try to press the submit button;
the entire website is brought to a crawl with slow load times;
and in essence it makes Community Server 2007 unusable.

DiscountASP.NET’s response:

I emailed DiscountASP.NET a few weeks ago asking them why do they continue to advertise that they support Community Server 2007 when a basic, unmodified installation does not work; I received the following response:

Hi

If your CS2007 version will be require more than 100mb of memory, then it will get recycled when you hit the 100mb limit. We cannot change our hosting platform to accomodate for higher memory usage and currently we do not offer an alternative platform for applications that use a lot of memory resources.

Please understand that our goal is to provide a secure and reliable hosting platform for all our customers. We do not host sites in shared app pools. We host each site in their own isolated application pool. We limit the memory usage to 100mb, which is more than double of what Internet Explorer or Microsoft Word uses. Also, our platform is for shared hosting. If we took out our memory usage restriction, if you got a handful of sites using high memory applications then the box would die or hang - affecting all the other customers on the box.

Also note that many of these CMS apps continue to increase in their memory usage over time as more content is added or as more users access the site. So even if we increased the memory limit some to accomodate a CMS app, there is going to be a point in the future where the same recycling issue will occur.

Many of these CMS apps offer modules that could even be open source. If a customer chooses to use these modules, they could be poorly written and cause high memory usage.

So, does the base install of CS2007 work on our platform? The answer is yes it does. Our developers noticed that the memory usage is less than our memory limits. As for your particular site or any of our other customers, we do not know how the customer is going to be using the application or how they will be modifying it. So we cannot really provide an answer to the question: “do you support cs 2007″ We have customers running community server without issue and we have customers running community server who are having recycling issues.

Our hosting platform is secure and reliable partly because we do not allow runaway resource usage and our customers appreciate the reliability. Our business decision is to continue to limit the memory usage to 100mb because we believe that applications can be written to be robust and efficient to never hit that limit.

At this time, all apps will recycle on our platform when they reach 100mb. If it is mission critical to use an application that uses more than 100mb, and if you do not wish to have the app recycle, then you will need to find an alternative host. We would recommend using a dedicated server if you want to highest uptime and unrestricted memory usage.

Notice the area I highlighted in bold. DiscountASP.NET claims that Community Server 2007 performs fine out of the box with no modification on DiscountASP.NET’s servers. That’s EXACTLY what my installation of Community Server 2007 Express Edition was. I used no plugins, nor did I use any additional themes. I didn’t even have the forums enabled! My installation had just 2 blogs and 1 photo gallery.

I’m wondering, what is DiscountASP.NET’s definition of out of the box is. Does this mean not enabling some of the base features? Does it mean that express edition specifically does not work? Who knows?

One thing I do know is that I’m not the first customer to discover DiscountASP.NET’s shortcomings when it comes to hosting Community Server 2007. I don’t care really if DiscountASP.NET can’t support Community Server 2007 properly, but I think it’s unethical for them to advertise that they do support it when in reality they cannot meet the needs of the most basic CS 2007 installations.

If anyone has a successful Community Server 2007 instance running off of a DiscountASP.NET shared host, can you please let us know how you made it work? Or even better, can someone from DiscountASP.NET show us their statistics indicating that a CS 2007 instance runs below the 100 megabyte memory limit?

How to drop all tables, all views, and all stored procedures from a SQL 2005 database on a shared host

Aaronontheweb — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 04:17:05 +0000

I installed Community Server on one of my DiscountASP.NET (referral link) shared hosting accounts and it populated my shared database on my hosting account with all of the appropriate tables and everything appeared to be going fine - until I came to the conclusion that I had installed Community Server 2007 incorrectly and for reasons that would take too much time to explain, I needed to wipe out the entire schema from scratch.

The problem: most shared hosts do not give their customers permission to add and drop entire databases at will for obvious security reasons, so I couldn’t simply drop the database, add a new one, then start over. I had to wipe the slate clean myself.

The solution: After many hours googling I happened across a blog entry from Jasper Jugan which posted two separate SQL queries, one for dropping all tables, and one for dropping all stored procedures.

His original solution has a bug in it however, which is that tables with foreign key dependencies do not get dropped the first pass through; you have to execute the table dropping script multiple times in order to clean all of them out.

If you make multiple passes with sp_MSforeachtable it it will eventually clear out all of the tables. I’ve implemented the following code below to make sure that the script doesn’t stop until all of the tables are gone.

--delete our tables first declare @table_count int; declare @iter int; -- we know we're going to have tables the first time through set @table_count = 1 ; set @iter = 0; -- check to see how many tables we have in the database while @table_count > 0 begin exec sp_MSforeachtable "DROP TABLE ? PRINT '? dropped' "; SET @table_count = (select COUNT(*) from sysobjects where type = 'U'and name <> 'dtproperties'); SET @iter = @iter + 1; end print 'iterations: ' + CAST(@iter as varchar);

I’ve gone ahead and created a SQL script based upon his code which will clean your database. You can view it below or download it from here: Drop All Stored Procedures, Views, and Tables from a SQL 2005 Database - SQL Script

create procedure DropSPViewsTables as


--delete our tables first

declare @table_count int;

declare @iter int;

-- we know we're going to have tables the first time through

set @table_count = 1 ;

set @iter = 0;

-- check to see how many tables we have in the database

while @table_count > 0

  begin

		exec sp_MSforeachtable "DROP TABLE ? PRINT '? dropped' ";

		SET @table_count = (select COUNT(*) from sysobjects where type = 'U'and name <> 'dtproperties');

		SET @iter = @iter + 1;

  end

print 'iterations: ' + CAST(@iter as varchar);
-- variable to object name

declare @name  varchar(100)

-- variable to hold object type

declare @xtype char(1)

-- variable to hold sql string

declare @sqlstring nvarchar(1000)
declare SPViews_cursor cursor for

SELECT sysobjects.name, sysobjects.xtype

FROM sysobjects

  join sysusers on sysobjects.uid = sysusers.uid

where OBJECTPROPERTY(sysobjects.id, N'IsProcedure') = 1

  or OBJECTPROPERTY(sysobjects.id, N'IsView') = 1 and sysusers.name =

'USERNAME'
open SPViews_cursor
fetch next from SPViews_cursor into @name, @xtype
while @@fetch_status = 0

  begin

-- test object type if it is a stored procedure

   if @xtype = 'P'

      begin

        set @sqlstring = 'drop procedure ' + @name

        exec sp_executesql @sqlstring

        set @sqlstring = ' '

      end

-- test object type if it is a view

   if @xtype = 'V'

      begin

         set @sqlstring = 'drop view ' + @name

         exec sp_executesql @sqlstring

         set @sqlstring = ' '

      end
-- get next record

    fetch next from SPViews_cursor into @name, @xtype

  end

close SPViews_cursor deallocate SPViews_cursor

A Demonstration:

I created a new database on my local SQL Server 2005 instance called ANDropScriptTest

Next I use the cs_3.1_CreateFullDatabase.sql script, which is the script used to install Community Server 2007’s full database schema. CS 2007 is an enterprise-class content management system used in some very large deployments, like the Halo Wars Forums, so its database isn’t small by any means. It’s the perfect test for this script!

It goes on like this for a while…

Once the table’s setup you simply open up the script I’ve created based upon the SQL code I found in Jasper Jungan’s blog.

Now note a couple of things that happen once this script is executed:

None of the system stored procedures get dropped (thank God)
The procedure DropSPViewsTables deletes itself so you don’t have to worry about it accidentally getting called again in the future once you clean your database.

If there are any bugs or suggestions you’d like to make feel free to add them!

The most basic (and important) features to consider when selecting a webhost

Aaronontheweb — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 05:14:40 +0000

I mentioned in my post about why I love DiscountASP.NET that I had been with a previous host for several years before I decided to switch. I spent a lot of time carefully evaluating other hosting options before I settled on DiscountASP.NET, and I’m going to go ahead and share the basic features that I think are most important in selecting a host.

I’m not going to get into the details regarding dedicated hosting services or anything for advanced websites, but simply what criteria you need to evaluate in order to pick out the best shared hosting service that fulfills your needs at the lowest cost. Pricing is another issue that I will address in a subsequent post.

Let’s take a look at the best features every host should have:

Disk space - The disk space of a host is an important limiting factor if you’re running a media-intensive website. If you’re planning on starting a blog that amasses large amounts of videos, images, music, or any other sort of large data items, then one of the first things you’re going to want to evaluate is the amount of disk space available.

Obviously, the more disk space you can get, the better.
Monthly data transfer - The monthly data transfer quota determines how much data per month users can download from your website. Again, media-intensive websites or simply high-trafficked websites will need to pay close attention to their data transfer consumption, because if your host doesn’t offer a large enough data transfer rate in its baseline package they can potentially gouge you for a lot of money to pay for additional bandwidth.

Again, the higher the data rate the better; some hosts actually support unlimited data transfer.
Domain Name Features - Does the host allow you to have unlimited domain names pointing at your hosting package? Do you have to register your domain name through the host? Is there an additional fee for directing a domain name you already own at your host’s servers? These are all pertinent questions to ask when you are selecting a host. Most website operators typically have one domain name point at their hosting package at any given time, but there’s always a possibility that you might have some old domain names that you’d like to have point towards your new hosting space. It’s important to look into this feature from the beginning.

Avoid hosts that charge additional fees for pointing an existing domain name at their servers, and definetly avoid hosts who won’t let you use a custom domain name at all.
Operating System and Server Software - Does the host use Windows and IIS or Linux and Apache? It’s important to determine ahead of time what operating systems and servers are supported because it may affect what kinds of software you can run on your site. For instance, an ASP.NET application will not be able to run on any server that doesn’t have the .NET framework (Windows) or Mono (LINUX). Usually though your choice of web server will be determined by the programming languages supported by the host for that particular kind of server, not the operating system/server itself.

Stick with hosts that offer support for multiple server configurations if you aren’t sure what to go with or if you anticipate changes to your hosting needs in the future, but if you are absolutely dead-set on a specific kind of configuration then stick with a host that sells hosting space in that configuration exclusively.
Programming Languages - What programming languages does your host support? You should already have an idea BEFORE you even think about buying hosting of what programming language you are going to use to develop your website, or what kind of programming language your off-the-shelf software (like Wordpress) supports. If you are just planning on launching a website that uses nothing but HTML/CSS/JavaScript then programming languages are a non-issue; however, you should still take them into consideration if you plan on ever developing a more dynamic website in the future.

I prefer hosts that offer multi-language support for a single hosting instance; DiscountASP.NET does PHP/ASP.NET/ASP 3.0. Just make sure you know ahead of time what language you will be working with primarily.
24/7 Technical Support - This is hands down the most important feature for me. If I go through the trouble of buying a website, it should be set up within minutes of my purchase, and I should never have to wait for a weekend to pass before I get a question answered. Atrociously slow and unhelpful technical support is why I switched hosts in the first place.

Avoid any host that doesn’t offer 24/7 technical support.
FTP Access - Will you be able to upload content to your website using a FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program of your choice or do you need to use a clunky, obnoxious web interface to perform all of your file management? If you’ve already gone through the trouble of producing a website, you shouldn’t have to spend much time or thought into uploading that content to your web hosting space. In addition if you have multiple people working on your website consider how many FTP accounts you have access to. Can you create multiple logins with different access rights?

Avoid any hosts that don’t provide FTP access; in addition it’s nice to have the option to provide FTP access to co-workers or associates down the road, so a host that offers multiple FTP accounts is a bonus.
Email Accounts, Forwarding, and Email Space - Does the host offer email with its hosting package? How many email accounts? What format (IMAP/POP3) does the host use? How much disk space is available per account? Does the host support email forwarding? If you want to have any sort of email accounts at your domain name, then this is an essential feature.

It is unusual to find a web host that does not offer some sort of email package along with its typical hosting; keep in mind that email disk space is counted as separate from your website’s disk usage.
Hosting Control Panel - Every hosting package should come with a control panel that allows you to administrate important aspects of your website, such as the email accounts, custom error messages, disk usage monitoring, bandwidth monitoring, permissions management, and so on.

I could write an entire post about the different features I like to have on a control panel, but if a host doesn’t offer a control panel PERIOD then it should be avoided like the plague.
Database Support - This again ties into the programming language and server configuration ideas; you need to know before you even start looking for a host what database you’re going to want to use. Many hosts offer a variety of database support options, such as MySQL, SQL Server 2005, Oracle, and so on. Also pay attention to how many connections, how much disk space, how many logins, and how many total databases a server will allot for your hosting package. Some hosts charge an additional fee for adding databases to your hosting package, whilst others offer it in their baseline.

The more stuff you get for free, the better; a host that allots a bunch of free space for databases is great. Also pay attention to how you can access their database system though; do you need to use a web client to do it?
Uptime - This is obvious, but if there’s a host out there that doesn’t do everything in its power to keep your website up 24/7, it should never be considered, ever.

I have never seen a host that doesn’t guarantee 24/7 uptime.

That about does it for basic features for web hosting. I’m going to write some subsequent posts about pricing, features for commercial website, and more “niche-hosting” documents, but this is a pretty comprehensive list of the most important base features that ANY host should be able to competently provide.

Attention: PHP executes twice as fast when it’s run on ASP.NET

Aaronontheweb — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 22:41:45 +0000

Read the title one more time. Yeah, I said it. PHP, one of the most popular web development languages, runs faster when it’s executed as compiled .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) using Phalanger 2.0 than it does running natively under the Zend interpreter.

What the hell is Phalanger?

Credits to Das Tierlexikon (The Animal Encyclopedia)

The animal in the image above is a Phalanger, but what I’m referring to is the Phalanger Project, which can be used to compile PHP applications into .NET binaries, which can execute in an ASP.NET application just like any other binary.

PHP projects compiled under Phalanger 1.0 and 2.0 perform better than those interpreted with Zend

AjaxNinja reader vjeran tipped me off to the existence of a .NET technology that makes PHP run “twice as fast,” and after a bit of poking around I finally found the Phalanger project and its benchmarks page, where, indeed, it was revealed that Phalanger 2.0 serves up phpBB pages at approximately twice the rate as the Zend engine.

Here’s the text from The Code Project’s piece on Phalanger:

We tried two kinds of performance tests - the micro-benchmarks show how fast is the execution of the most important elementary operations (like calling a function, calling function by name, array access, etc.) on Phalanger and PHP interpreter.

The results are very good - from the 25 tests in total, Phalanger is faster in 19 tests and the difference in the 6 remaining tests is very small. The second test compares performance of the PhpBB forum application running on PHP and Phalanger. The results show that Phalanger was able to serve almost two times more pages per second!

Phalanger extends the PHP language

One of the attractive features of Common Language Runtime (CLR) compilers is that you can borrow a feature from any of the CLR programming languages in any .NET project. When I was developing a credit-card validation system for a business I often imported some of the VB.NET string manipulation functions into my C# applications, simply because VB.NET has better options for performing simple whitespace removal and a number of other menial string-related tasks.

When you create a PHP application with Phalanger, you gain access to all of the features of the .NET framework! So if you wanted to use the .NET membership framework within a PHP5 application, you could accomplish this using Phalanger.

Phalanger integrates PHP development into Visual Studio

So long as you are not using the express editions of Visual Studio, Phalanger enables you to create PHP Web Application projects in Visual Studio.

This also means that you can use the Visual Studio debugging tools for fault-checking your PHP applications, break points et al.

Some drawbacks to using PHP with Phalanger

Phalanger might produce more scalable and better performing PHP applications, but the using Phalanger for running PHP eliminates some of the most attractive features of PHP in the first place:

Less hosting options - The strongest feature of PHP is its ability to run on a wide number of different operating systems and server configurations. .NET applications only execute on Windows servers running Internet Information Services (IIS), thus your choices for which PHP hosting service you use are limited to just Windows/IIS configurations should you compile with Phalanger.
No inter-operation with unmanaged modules - If you referenced unmanaged* third-party modules in a PHP application that you wanted to run under Phalanger for the performance benefits, you’d be unable to. All .NET code is managed code.
No IntelliSense support for PHP, yet - Although they may add IntelliSense support in future releases, if you’re used to relying on it for ASP.NET development, then you may feel a bit naked without it if you try jumping into PHP development for .NET. This really isn’t a problem for traditional PHP developers though.

For ASP.NET developers, I recommend checking this tool out so you can try playing around with PHP/.NET hybrid projects.

For PHP developers, if you’re worried about the performance of your PHP applications then I’d give this a look; if not for that, give it a look for the sake of being able to borrow .NET framework features and use them natively in your PHP applications.

Why I Love DiscountASP.NET Hosting

Aaronontheweb — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 07:01:02 +0000

My personal website, Aaronontheweb.com is about 7 years old. Until this year I had it hosted with a service called Blueberry Hill hosting; Bluehill never had any problem with uptime or bandwidth, but they had some of the worst support I have ever used.

I remember how hard it was to use their “control panel” for remotely administering my shared hosting website, and how they had a new login for some new service that didn’t work every couple of years, which I ultimately ended up losing and for some reason or another they couldn’t give me the information to get access to my own website.

When I decided to launch VandyStudents.com in the Spring of 2006, there was no doubt in my mind that I would be taking on a different host, and that’s when I discovered DiscountASP.NET. I’ve never looked back.

Here’s a short list of reasons why DiscountASP.NET kicks serious ass:

24/7 tech support service; I usually end up buying new domain names, add-ons, or full hosting packages at bizarre hours of the morning, and I get responses to my tech support inquiries within hours, sometimes minutes, of sending them.
Instant set up; as soon as your credit card clears, your hosting is ready to go. You don’t have to wait on any humans to do the set up for you; a default shared IIS hosting instance is spawned on demand. I absolutely hated having to wait for a weekend to pass for Blue Hill to set up my hosting (they do have 24/7 service now though), but now I don’t even have to wait 5 minutes if I want a new hosting package right now.

Easy-to-use Control Panel: DiscountASP.net offers a very user-friendly remote control panel for administering your shared hosting account with full access to features like:
- Email account management
- Default Document specification
- Application management
- .NET versioning (1.1 vs 2.0)
- Web-based SQL Server 2000 Query Manager (if you use SQL 2000; SQL Server 2005 allows you to just connect from the SQL 2005 Client)
- Windows permissions manager
- Domain name management
Those are just some of the features that I find myself using pretty frequently (VandyStudents uses SQL 2000) and I have grown to love them. What’s even cooler though is that DiscountASP.NET gives you access to their control panel API which you can implement in your own programs!
It’s cheap; Starting at $10 a month with the first 3 months free is pretty darn cheap for ASP.NET hosting. It’ll cost you an additional $5/month for some type of database hosting, but even with at a total of $15/month (not including the first 3 months free) it’s dirt cheap given the high quality of service.
PHP and MySQL Support;Yeah, that’s right, they host PHP5 on any IIS account free of charge, and a MySQL database costs just the same as any other database add on ($5/month). That way I can do both cool ASP.NET programs and use Wordpress on the same hosting instance!

As someone who got dicked around by other hosts, I am so glad to be have DiscountASP.NET as my ASP.NET host. They have treated me very well, and I am proud to accept commissions for referring other users to their service. Please get some DiscountASP.NET hosting today if you are tired of inconvenient or absurdly expensive ASP.NET shared hosting services.