I’ve known about vaasnet for quite a while. Basically, vaasnet is a way to almost instantly (OK, it took about 4 seconds to come up) grab a fresh VM (currently 99 cents an hour), do a bunch of stuff and go away. My bunch of stuff was I need to download a bittorrent file that was about 5 gig and I know if I do it from either home or over my hotspot, bad things will happen. If I do it at home, Comcast will send me a letter accusing me of stealing something, and if I use my Verizon hotspot, well, it’s a 5 gig per month plan. You do the math.
Back to vaasnet. Here is my experience today:
- 30 seconds to put my credit card it
- 4 seconds to boot a general purpose workstation
- 5 seconds to RDP into it
- 2 minutes to download bit torrent
- 35 minutes to have bit torrent download a 5 gig file!
- 35 minutes to have bit torrent download a 5 gig file (had to say it twice)
- 1 minute to transfer the file to my ORCSWeb server I already have
- $1.70 billed to my credit card.
- OMG!
I think that about says it all. OK, maybe not it all.
I’ll be back!
OK, now that says it all.
The Problem
In my scenario, I have the same web project that I want to host in two different Windows Azure Data Centers (BTW, Steve Marx let me know it’s “Windows Azure” and not “Azure” at MVP Summit so I’ll try and keep my terminology right as much as I can). Each Windows Azure Data Center has it’s own azure account (Azure Credential). It resolves to a different domain name and as part of that scenario, has different properties in the ServiceConfiguration.csfg file.
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Background
About a month ago, purchased to Level 3 VPS (Virtual Private Servers) running Linux for about $50 a piece. I’m close to launching a new product and that’s product customized shopping experience, forums and web site are all built with php. I had several things that were important to me.
- Full Service Linux Hosting
- PCI Certified for processing Credit Cards
- First Class Customer Service
I’ve always known of HostGator by it’s excellent reputation so it was an easy choice. Up until this week, I did not realize what an excellent decision I had made.
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Many of you know of ORCSWeb either by reputation, or by way of Scott Forsyth, one of my ASP.NET MVP brothers. In case you don’t, they are a managed hosting solutions company specializing in Microsoft technologies. I’ve used their basic services for quite a while and have always been very happy. It has always seemed that anytime I’ve called them (and it always seems like the middle of the night) one of their tech support staff is always available to help me, and go the extra mile if necessary.
The company I’m now working at is small and we don’t have a lot of resources to maintain hardware and do operating system type support. We do have a high load requirement so we need a very robust supported solution. Before this, I’d always been in the under $50 per month type plan with ORCSWeb, but I decided I needed more servers and a higher level of support. I really did not know what level of support to expect when signing up for the managed servers but decided to go for it anyway.
All can say is WOW!!! I am over the top impressed.
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