RE: Admin Server 2003 myself? Or find someone to host?

Hi chessaurus,

I am a big believer in outsourcing anything that is not part of your
standard line of business. Sure, there are some things that you might want
to do yourself -- configuration of SQL for your app and setup of your .Net
app pools -- but the hosting, security, and DNS end of things take a bit of
planning, especially if you are expecting the site to be up all the time and
able to resist some failure.

For this, you'll need to quantify your tolerance for failure and the
isolation you need in the hardware and match that to how much you are willing
to pay in a hosting company and what kind of service/ support you need from
them. From that, you should be able to make your decision.

Finally, you haven't given us much idea of the traffic you expect and how
intensive you think the app will be. Generally, you shouldn't worry about
where the server is hosted for an ASP.Net app as a good Internet provider
will have sufficient bandwidth, load balancing, and BGP failover to handle
this well. If you do have a lot of streaming content that would need to be
pushed, you might want to consider one of the streaming companies like akamai
or cachefly to push that content in a more localized fashion.

I use serverintellect for my personal hosting and have been very pleased
with their service though there are a ton of good companies out there. I
would suggest talking with several of them and building a list of what you
liked from each of them. It is important to be unbiased and objective in
your review.

Hope this helps
--
Ryan Hanisco
MCSE, MCTS: SQL 2005, Project+
http://www.techsterity.com
Chicago, IL

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"chessaurus@xxxxxxxxx" wrote:

I am part of a team that is developing a custom, high-volume ASP.NET
application that will receive primarily local traffic (ie from my
city).

I have used hosted ASP.NET providers in the past (like Intermedia and
ResellerChoice) and these have worked well for our earlier/smaller
projects, but I'm worried about scalability for our upcoming larger
project. These providers all geographically far away from my city
(which seems inefficient) and share an individual SQL Server instance
with many other customers (which lessens our ability to scale).

I'm toying with the idea of buying a Dell with Windows Server 2003 and
SQL Server, but I'm wondering how much work this will be to secure and
administer. I am an engineer with significant software development
experience, but limited SysAdmin experience.

Any advice will be greatly appreciated,
Zach

.

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