Successful Shared Hosting Deployments?

Posted by Community Admin on 03-Aug-2018 22:47

Successful Shared Hosting Deployments?

All Replies

Posted by Community Admin on 12-Apr-2011 00:00

Has anyone had a successful production deployment to a shared hosting environment?

If so, where did you host?  And would you be willing to share your experiences?

Thanks!

Posted by Community Admin on 13-Apr-2011 00:00

Yes, I used Arvixe.  They were kind enough to help us with the orphaned DiscountASP.net web sites from GiveCamp.

I'm hesitant to say much more, since I work for Telerik and don't want to be biased towards 1 of our hosting partners.  However, they have very affordable hosting accounts that support 4.x.  I also found their Control Panels to be very useful in the midst of the process.  I'm greatly appreciative for their help.

Gabe Sumner
Telerik | Sitefinity CMS

Posted by Community Admin on 13-Apr-2011 00:00

@Bryan

I also host with Arvixe.com. No problem. Great value and every simply works. Tryed the Shard Hosting first and liked the company so much I ordered a VPS.

So far no complains only compliments from my side.

Markus

Posted by Community Admin on 13-Apr-2011 00:00

Thanks again, Markus (and Gabe), for your suggestion.  I took your advice and the deployment went off without a hitch.  The inbound FTP is painfully slow though.  Transfer rate is about 52 KB/s.

Posted by Community Admin on 14-Apr-2011 00:00

Interesting.

This account is on their shared hosting so my guess is they throttle it down big time.  I uploaded over a gig of stuff (between the sitefinity app itself and a very media-heavy database) and the uploads started out at about 600 KB/s then after about 2 seconds dropped to a very predictable 52.  No biggie...it's only time right?  It gave me a chance to go get lunch, get a pedicure, catch a movie and have a nap.  An enjoyable afternoon in the end ;-).

Cheers!
Bryan

Posted by Community Admin on 12-Jul-2011 00:00

Bryan,

How has your experience been with Arvixie?  I've been through 2 shared hosting providers so far and haven't been happy.  First I tried seedotnet (a Sitefinity partner) and was very disappointing.  They had great customer service but went down at least once a week.  Recently, I switched to WinHost.  They were more reliable and had a decent control panel but they don't offer a plan that's powerful enough for Sitefinity.  They offer a 30 day money back gurantee so I thought I would try them even though I knew Sitefinity would be underpowered.  Sitefinity requires a min of 500MB memory and the most you can get through WinHost is 200MB.  They won't let you purchase more memory either.  Sitefinity is painfully slow at 200MB so I'm looking for someone else.   

Posted by Community Admin on 12-Jul-2011 00:00

I had the same experience as you in trying other hosting companies.  We tried DiscountASP and Intermedia and both fell WAY short.  Arvixe has been fine so far.  Good uptime and sufficient resources at an affordable price.  I would recommend them for a Sitefinity project.

Posted by Community Admin on 14-Dec-2011 00:00

We have been using the Arvixe business plan with SF 4.x (recently upgraded to 4.3) and are very disappointed with the performance. We have tons of timeouts on the backend (specially when updating shared content). They also never mention on their site that the SQL server version that you get is SQL server express ( they simply mention SQL Server 2008). Based on our experience the bottleneck seems to be the database which is not surprising given that Arvixe runs SQL on the same box as the web front end instead of having a completely separate SQL server box.
Based on our experience I certainly cannot recommend Arvixe to anyone.

Posted by Community Admin on 14-Dec-2011 00:00

Dear Hugo

Just wondering. Have you talked to Arvixe Support? What did they tell you?

http://www.sitefinity.com/resources/system-requirements.aspx now states a min. requirement of 512 MB.

Markus

Posted by Community Admin on 07-Jan-2012 00:00

Hi Markus,

Thanks for your reply. We have contacted Arvixe support in a number of occasions but, by the time they get involved, the site is back up again so they say "everything seems to be running normally". We are extremely disappointed with the overal experience and with the amount of time it takes to do anything with the backend.

We are aware of the 512MB requirements but, given that Arvixe is one of the Telerik's recommended hosting providers for SF 4.X and that they clearly state that they "fully adhere to all SiteFinity 4 hosting requirements" (http://www.arvixe.com/sitefinity_hosting), we assumed that they are aware of that requirement as well.

I cannot state strongly enough on how disappointed we are with SiteFinity running in Arvixe and my recommendation is still to stay well away from them.

Best Regards,
Hugo

Posted by Community Admin on 11-Jan-2012 00:00

Hello,

I'm sorry to hear you've experienced performance problems with your site when running on shared hosting. Generally most of the performance issues in such scenarios are related to the limited memory available for the application pool, which leads to frequent site recycling. If this is the case, please check your web.config file. There you must set a machine key for your website. This is necessary with shared hosting providers, otherwise you will experience issues as described in this article: FormsAuthentication, HttpModules, Machinekey, application pool recycling, encryption benchmarks, and the 'Remember me' checkbox. You might also take a look at our Tips for optimizing performance.
Let me elaborate a little bit on the latter. The default output cache we have set for pages is 120 seconds, and is using sliding expiration, which means that once the page is loaded in your browser's cache, this cached version will expire in 2 minutes after the last request made to it, and the next request will be served from the server, not cache.
On the other hand, you might want to check the intervals your application pool recycles (i.e. the site needs to compile again) - these can be controlled from IIS, the default value being 1740minutes.

By default Sitefinity provides both output cache, and through its OpenAccess ORM uses data caching for content retrieved from the database, so unless you have disabled any of these explicitly, there should be not problems with your site's performance. I'll be listing some things you might want to check below:

1. Please check if you are requesting any external resources (e.g. fonts, javascript, images)
2. Use FireBug or some other developer's tool to check if all images, and CSS on your site is being properly loaded from cache. By default once cached they should.
3. Make sure some of the resources on your pages are not blocked. I'm attaching a sample screenshot demonstrating how a blocked resource will look in FireBug. Here is a very good explanation on several topics why blocking occurs. The blocking appears to be caused by simultaneous loading of many items and the browser allows only a certain ( 6 for Firefox) at a time. Observing other websites it appears to be a common scenario when many resources have to be loaded.
4. You might request on some information about the hardware configuration of you server, and if it allows you to use only a limited amount of memory(RAM) or it is using all?
5. Set static files expiration in IIS to a different value so that static files are not loaded every time from your project folder in order to be sent to the requesting client. This is mainly concerning .png images that take about a second each time page is requested.
6. As performance gets better when the site gets visited and the corresponding loads are about 3-5 seconds it may be a good option to write a crawler that will visit your site at some time interval in order to prevent the first user performance hit. Here is a sample tutorial + complete code of a web crawler.

I hope the above information helps you achieve the desired performance results, please do not hesitate to let us know if any issues persist

All the best,
Boyan Barnev
the Telerik team

Do you want to have your say in the Sitefinity development roadmap? Do you want to know when a feature you requested is added or when a bug fixed? Explore the Telerik Public Issue Tracking system and vote to affect the priority of the items

Posted by Community Admin on 07-Feb-2012 00:00

I write this while - once again - waiting for one of my pages to 'attempt' to publish. I currently get about 1 in 5 successful publishes. I have tried the recommendations in the article explained above, did nothing but waste yet more time. We are on Arvixe and the performance using the back-end is appalling. Most of the time it times out, then I get just get a string of errors, e.g "row locking issues", then "database create permissions", "Return code xxx".

Please - can someone from Telerik, tell us how to get the site performing well on shared hosting ? If it can't, please be honest and we will stop "trying".

Have to say my experience, with SF 4 has been an absolute joke.

Posted by Community Admin on 07-Feb-2012 00:00

Dear Mark

What hosting plan are you on with Arvixe?

Have you talked to Arvixe support. What was the anwer? I have 8 sites running SF 4.3 or 4.4 (mostly low traffic) but have not seen above 300 MB of Ram usage since 4.2.

Can you give us the public url so one can have a look at it?

Markus

Posted by Community Admin on 07-Feb-2012 00:00

yeah sure : its http://www.collaboris.co.uk
BTW - we are using 4.3 and have noticed the more pages we add, the slower its getting using the backend. This is especially true if we edit Shared Content, or the templates. But now, even publishing a page is timing out most times.

Posted by Community Admin on 07-Feb-2012 00:00

Dear Mark

That leaves the question of the Arvixe Hosting Plan you are using.

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Well if you can I would update to 4.4 (seems you dit bit the bullet already so I would take it a bit furthe)r and also prepare for optimum update to 5.0 later this month.

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I don't know how SF works and if the following has any performance influence in the backend but sure would have in the front. I noticed some stuff when simply checking your site.

You have a total of 56 request (31 .js  and 5 .css files) from 12 different servers all stuff amounting up to 1 MB of data for the homepage.

So try script combining and if some of them are you own optimze them.

Just the Collaboris/App_Themes/Clean/global/main.css could be reduced by 8 kb.
If you check this page http://www.collaboris.co.uk/products/docread/screencasts you see that you are loading huge images for thumbs http://www.collaboris.co.uk/images/screencast-first-frames/docread-overview.png for example.

Even if the above stuff does not help backend it will improve performance of your site.

Markus

Posted by Community Admin on 07-Feb-2012 00:00

Hi Markus

Our plan with Arvixe is "Business Class ASP".

There's no problem with the front-end (cached), its pretty ok. It's purely the backend that we are having awful problems with.

We have these problems, on very lightweight content-only pages. However, i will try and make our assets smaller, but, in the grand scheme of things, it isn't the main problem. Something else is seriously wrong. I think our App Pool is recycling as we get lots of timeouts, which also quite often brings the main site down. We get quite a few errors about "CREATE DATABASE permission denied on 'master'. too.

Thanks for your help.

Posted by Community Admin on 07-Feb-2012 00:00

The attached image is the error i am getting right now, just simply trying to publish a page and its not he screencasts one..

Posted by Community Admin on 07-Feb-2012 00:00

Dear Mark
That error is a pretty good lead for telerik I would say.

http://forums.asp.net/t/1438200.aspx/1 might be a starting point. Have you added any custom controls (same old same question)

Have you tried from home. Just to be sure it's not a firewall issue or something :-) long shot

Markus

Posted by Community Admin on 07-Feb-2012 00:00

Hi Markus

Not using any custom controls - in fact - it's all pure SF 4.3 as it comes. When we run the whole application from the office, it's much better, although still not blisteringly fast. Never has been really since day 1.

We are caught between a rock and hard place as I'd ideally love to move away from SF, but the time we have invested in all of the content is unbelievable. Hence, we are forced to try and solve this problem by throwing more resources at it, which is frustrating and annoying. (I am convinced it's a lack of memory on the box, so we need to pay a different ISP for a better service, to combat SF's hunger for memory). There's also several other issues, as mentioned earlier, but these are probably just SiteFinity bugs.

The annoying fact is that we also tried Azure for a few weeks, but that also came with it's own set of issues. SiteFinity didn't work well there either. Hence, this is going to be our 3rd potential home for SF.

Does anyone know of a different host that has a seperate SQL and more memory ? We are now looking at MaxAsp and Softsys so far.

Anyway, Markus - thanks for trying to help - I really appreciate it!

Posted by Community Admin on 07-Feb-2012 00:00

Dear Mark

A VPS costs 60$ a month with Arvixe which is about 400 USD more per year from what you pay now. But you get 1,5 GB RAM
http://www.arvixe.com/windows_vps_hosting
After all the trouble I sure would give it a try they have a 60 Day Money Back Guarantee
Since you spent so much time I would go ahead and try it.

a) you can see exactely how much RAM SF uses
b) If it is still not running smoothly you know its not the hoster
c) If it runns smoothly then pay the extra 400 a year and go back to restfull sleeping :-)

Just a thought

Markus

Posted by Community Admin on 07-Feb-2012 00:00

Hi Markus,

I cannot understand how 1.5GB of RAM would be enough to efficiently run the OS + IIS + SQL.

Am I missing something?

Regards,
Hugo

Posted by Community Admin on 07-Feb-2012 00:00

Dear Hugo
You might be right. I have tow VPSClass ASP Pro servers with 3 GB Ram so I never cosidered the base cosumption.
Markus

Posted by Community Admin on 09-Feb-2012 00:00

As an update in case anyone else is enjoying very poor performance on Shared..

We scrambled around for 2 days looking for a good VPS host, when Ryan contacted me from South West Broadband via Twitter. I am delighted to say that we have now got a quad-CPU, 6-Gb RAM Virtual Server all for around £70/month (no contract, no minimum term). Ryan had the whole thing set-up within 3 hours and the performance is something to behold. SiteFinity is absolutely flying!  

Hence, if you had the terrible problems we had using Shared then you should move to a VPS. If you want to contact Southwest then their site is here : http://www.swbroadband.co.uk or you can find Ryan on Twitter here : https://twitter.com/#!/swbroadband.

Can't recommend them enough! I can now publish a page in 2 seconds instead of 2 minutes.

This thread is closed