Hmm...Line Upgrade or Third Party Hosting (long, pointless post warning!)

posted on Tuesday, June 22, 2004 3:27 AM

I have a decision to make, currently this site is hosted on my littile mini-itx server on my highly suspect 512k ADSL line, this has been perfect for my needs for a while now but now my traffic is really starting to ramp up - 15000 hits today and 150mb data transfer (that's with IIS 6.0 Compression at full tilt), so here's my dilemma: I want to keep the responsiveness of this site whilst retaining my ability to mess around with the bits on it with relative ease. The messing about with part is pretty important to me and essentially rules out hosting my site on something like weblogs.asp.net - as does the proliferation of users over there, the main feed (HTML) is something like 400k now and practically unusable on a dial-up- compression would help a LOT! Other options, upgrading my line and server...the line bit is pretty much out, my provider tells me I'd have up to 14 days downtime for that - and it doesn't even allow the upgrade of my upload speed -stuck at 256k! The server...hmm...well it's fine really, I need to up the memory (currently at 512mb - which I need to at least double) but I've realy been impressed with Windows Server 2003 for it's reliability and speed and the little server machine itself has just been perfect. So, that leaves me with hosting, this site used to be on Brinkster...hmm...well it was mainly because they offered .NET hosting before almost anyone else but to be honest their uptime sucked (I was at around 70%) and with them being across the water, support and basic response time from here was an issue. So, that leaves third party hosting - here's where you cpme in, I'm looking for a reliable, preferably UK based hoster which really supports .NET (as opposed to having installed it at one point but don't really know anything about it) - so farthe best candidate seems to be OneAndOne - but I have no experience of this company - do you?