Looking for reliable Windows dedicated server, please help

Hi Everyone,

I’ve been looking for answers and this forum seems to be the perfect place to get real feedback, so here it goes. And thank you in advance for anyone who can help

We’ve just finished building a .NET MVC application, using MS SQL, and right now running on Windows server 2008. We would like to now launch the site/application and make it live. The application is pretty cpu and memory intensive so we’re looking for a really good dedicated server (OR cloud server?). We would like for users to really enjoy a super fast experience.

I was looking at maybe 12 cores min, and ideally 64 GB of RAM. But I’m not really sure what the ideal setup for us would be.

I have a few questions:

1) Can you guys recommend a reliable and affordable dedicated host?

2) We were looking at Amazon EC2, but they are pricy, and I’ve just read many comments on this forum to stick to dedicated
instead. what are your thoughts?

3) Any feedback on ReliableSite.net? I love their pricing, but I’ve read very mixed reviews, some say they’re great, and some say they were very disappointed with customer service reply time

4) I’ve seen that some host offer network speeds of 100 mbps, while some offer 1 GBps, does this really affect the site speed?

5) We’re considering even hiring someone, someone with real system administration experience to help us through the process, any thoughts? or recommendations?

Thanks in advance for you help, thoughts and recommendations.

Maybe you can try to ask for a test server. Maybe you do not need that amount of CPU cores and RAM memory.

How many disk space do you need?
Also about data base. What size of the database is planned and how intense it will be used?

Network speed:

100mbps = 12.5mb/s upload/download speed
1Gbps = 125mb/s speed

I think, that it will be cheaper to rent a dedicated server from somewhere. Also you need to think about server administrator, if you do not have an experience with MicroSoft products like MS SQL.

We need about 200-300 gb of disc space to start, but we would need a lot more if the application is successful and more people sign up, so we were thinking to start with 1TB.

We have fairly good experience using IIS, Windows server 2008 etc, but we’re not system administrators so things like loadbalancing or clustered ,etc, we’re not very familiar with

Question? If we would need to loadbalancing or clustering, can this be done on Dedicated servers, or is it only on the cloud?

Try to get a 512 SSD or raid 10. You can upgrade your standard 100mb port to 1gb quickly if you find its slowing everything down.

Before you make a choice make sure to contact support to confirm they will support you with load balancing issues and the other higher tech issues you worry about. Many fully managed providers have a set limit on things they can help you with.

When you say IO disk intensive, are you referring to an app constantly writing to the db? like saving and storing data?

As for the RAID, yes definitely, thanks. But why RAID10, from i’ve read 2 x 1TB drives in Raid-1 would be perfect, as kindly pointed out by SoloDrive.

Also, talking about RAID, I read that it’s better to use a hardware RAID card, versus a software RAID, does that make sense?

Lastly, I agree on the managed services. The company I use now limits their managed services to really updating the OS, and thinks like that, I would like more, or as suggested, to work with a system admin guy.

Yes, but is it just the app that will be reading/writing data? Are you going to have a web front end to that app? How many hits/visits do you expect on your web application in that case? It could add up to your disk IO cost.

Go for a hardware controller. You should stay away from Microsoft’s software RAID. More importantly though, make sure you get a server with a RAID controller that has management application for MS Windows (most do nowadays) so that you can monitor your RAID array’s health.

Many service providers will support the operating system and many popular server appliances installed on it. Rarely a provider will support your application’s performance and stability though.

Ideal thing will be to go with a Fully managed service provider who has actually knowledge of MVC5, IIS management, Full trust, etc… in Windows environment. For a resource intensive website, the best solution will be to start with hosting your web & database on different server in a cluster. DB server should be pure SSD based. As you grow further, you can add one more web server / DB server in your cluster and load balance them.

1GBPS or 10GBPS server connection is recommended.

IO disk intensive means, higher read and write operations on disk. Usually, database driven sites are high disk IO intensive. We recommend to use SSD based drives for DB server. SSD drives are many times faster that traditional drives and easily gives you much much better performance.

For managed options, Go with the company who is actually aware about Windows servers management (e.g., IIS Admin, Remote Management of IIS, URL rewrite, MVC5, etc …)

For instances like Raid-10, yes hardware raid is usually better as it offers additional benefits like write cache. However, I would never recommend hardware raid for Raid-1. It only adds an additional piece of hardware that can fail to the mix.

It doesn’t sound like their managed services are all that inclusive, usually managed providers will do more than just OS updates and management.

And yes, IO is basically the read/writes to the hard drives. SSD drives are up to 50X more capable of handing this better than conventional drives which is why its very recommended for people with DB intensive sites/servers.