I just bought a WD my cloud ex2.
The reason I bought this over the white original my cloud is that this machine can produce a public IP for FTP transfer, becoming a true cloud based storage. But i also want to free myself from the chains of expensive web-hosting and it makes me feel even more pathetic because I have a storage device and I'm still buying storage for my websites. I build asp.net websites using WebMatrix, and have a SQL Server Database. Can my storage device run ASP.NET? I don't know much about Windows Server, but does that have to be installed in the myCloud? Would there be any way to do so?
Thank you.
No. Not an MS box. But you can use MySQL and recode your asp.net to php. Another great choice would be to get a free (for 1 year) Amazon Web Services EC2 instance. You can run a small MS Server there and keep your stuff in ASP.net
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I have wordpress application running on my EC2 - AWS. I haven't decide which one is Amazon RDS or my own database on different hosting. Which one is the cheapest to use? Let's say I have my own MySQL database from Lunarpages or Bluehost hosting, to allow my wordpress on EC2 instance to connect/remote to my database on Lunarpages not allow my wordpress to connect remote to Amazon RDS. Which one is the cheapest to use? I heard people saying when you use Amazon RDS is very expensive, so I thought maybe to save costs to allow my wordpress to connect to my own database not Amazon RDS for wordpress. I don't know it is true or not. I don't know how it performance well. Which one is the best one. Any suggestion appreciated. Thank you.
I don't agree with that. In amazon AWS, the first thing you do is set up a virtual private network and create the corresponding network access interfaces. My experience working with heavy CMSs is that the architecture is much more stable with EC2 + RDS, each in one instance. In addition RDS has automated version maintenance and it is much more difficult to fail or suffer a crash, as opposed to a mysql or similar, running on the same virtual machine.
Also in terms of speed and performance, working with this scheme for example in wordpress, the system flies, the speed is much higher and appreciable even with small machines.
Running on a different hosting will cause extra latency.
Let's do the math on AWS RDS for the smallest instances (taking eu-west-1 region as example)
Running on RDS: db.t2.micro $0.018 per hour, or $12.96 per month for RDS. Free the first year under AWS free tier.
Running on EC2: t2.micro (You configure MySQL and backups, ...), $0.0126 per hour, or $9.07 per month. Free the first year under AWS free tier
If your application is small enough, you could host both your database and your application on the same machine (solution 2)
Performance wise is not good to have database on a totally different network of the website hosted itself. It'll delay. Imagine if you have a lot of calls, it'll multiply the delay.
You can host a local database on the EC2 it'self, this would be the best choice.
I'm writing a Qt/C++ application and i plan to add a network part with socket connection to a server implemented in Qt also.
If i host locally the server there is no real problem.
But if i want to share my application (client part) with some people and then be sure my server is always running, the best way would be to have a distant server.
Could you give me some clue to do it ? It's not still clear for me for steps to follow in this case.
Is it a better way for that ?
Can i find free hosting ?
Thanks a lot! :-)
There are generally 3 options:
1. Local hosting
This is server running at Your physical location. You can set it clearly as You want and the server will do whatever You want. But must be turned on the whole time, when there is no other work it will just consume power. Also You must get all the hardware (server components), software for running (Operation system), network device and connection (some router, which needs to have special set-up [NAT, port-forward, ...], speed and reachability of the internet connection) and most likely also some security device/SW (firewalls or so).
This is best idea for basic developement and testing. But once the service should work for public audience, it is not really worth to run server Yourself.
2. Remote hosting (virtualized or dedicated server)
This option was the top in last 20-30 years, where all the Web developers and App developers were putting their software on some prepared server. Dedicated is physical server running at some providers' location, who are lending You the hardware (and maybe some license for OS/other SW). Virtualized machine is just 1 hardware piece (server) with multiple virtual servers on it (more clients running on same hardware).
This got generally benefits as the networking/security/hardware issues are being carried out by the hosting owner. You are just borrowing some diskspace and computer time/performance. Normally the company will provide whole server, on which You can set up several services, run multiple protocols, etc..
Ideal solution for webs and single/few (not much) instances of server application(s).
3. Cloud hosting
This is the newest technology at the moment (alive around 10-15 years [eg. AWS running since 2006, Azure since 2010]). Datacenter owners (from 2. point) get better and created some applications on the servers, which will do all the work for You (mostly automatically). In few clicks the servers are running and application can be deployed, used database engines, web pages, IOT hubs, ... quite lot of stuff. Benefits are clearly that You just have to spent minimum of time to set up things and they will run. With high uptime (eg.: 99.9995%).
Difference between dedicated & cloud: On dedicated server there can be put almost any OS which fits the needs, run just services You want, have full control. In cloud solution, You don't have so much of "physical" control and the data moreless live somewhere in Datacenters all over the world. But generally it is more scalable solution and once Your app will be used by lot of users from public sector, this is best way to go.
Common ideology:
The most common solution is that when You develop, You create local server on which You deploy, test, improve. Once stable, order a server either on cloud or as dedicated/virtual machine and deploy it there. Some developers knows that their App will run on cloud services from the very beggining so they order it and start developing against it, but in most cases there is no need for that.
We have a web-application product that we sell to companies that is hosted at our servers.
The product contains couple of web applications, windows services and SQL server db.
Right now we have only one client that uses our product. We have two servers - one for the web apps and services and other for the db.
In order to add the product to another client, we have to 'duplicate' all the apps and db and run in separately.
As we started expanding and some companies will require more server power then others, I need to plan the servers infrastructure.
Having two servers for each client sounds ridiculous. Hosting costs will be huge. What will happen when I'll have 10 clients? And probably some servers will take more power than others, leaving servers using 30% from their capacity while others use 70%.
One thing I really care about is separating the DB from each product so in case of server compromise, only one db will be at risk.
So... I thought about Virtual Machines...
Does it sounds right?
Do I need two super servers to hold virtual machine instances? (one for web and other for db?)
What about Load balancing / etc..?
Will it require more maintenance time only because I use virtual machines?
Are there any hardware recommendations?
Any help will be appreciated
Many thanks
Virtual Machines is definitely the safest way to separate clients and will allow you the flexibility to allocate a specific percentage of resources to specific clients.
However, using separate processes on the same physical machine will perform better (but not always significantly) and will allow more dynamic use of resources (i.e., if one spikes, it will use the resources it needs). This setup will not allow you to control the resource allocation nearly as easily though. You'll also have to build your own monitoring tools to see and analyze what processes (clients) are using what resources (piggyback on perfmon).
Using separate processes also is dangerous if your application wasn't designed for this. Anywhere the application caches data on the file system or accesses anything besides memory and the database needs to be thoroughly scrubbed to make sure data from clients is not co-mingled or shared.
Separate virtual machines is more work to manage--each one is pretty much like it's own computer. So you have to manage all the VM's plus the physical machine.
You may also want to consider hosting in a more dynamic environment like Amazon AWS or Microsoft's Azure which will allow you to more easily scale up/down as necessary than a VM at a traditional host.
I have a client who is interested in hiring my company to do a small, custom, multi-user contact database/crm. They don't care about the technology I use, as long as the product is hosted inside their organization (no "cloud" hosting). Now the problem is that their IT department refuses to host any application developed by an outside company on their servers, additionally they will not allow any server not serviced by them inside of their network.
The only means of sharing data that IT would allow is a windows network share...
I was thinking to do the application as a fat client in Adobe Air, and let all users access a shared sqlite database, but then I read a lot of negative things about this approach.
So I'm asking you - Are there people out there who have actually tried this ?
What are your experiences ?
You can use an MS-Access 2007+ (accdb) file.
Of course there are many database engines with much more features and much better SQL syntax, but if you are looking for a file-based database system that can be accessed simultaneously by multiple processes on a shared Windows drive, then an accdb file is as good as you're going to get I think.
Also note that another popular embedded database, SQL Server Compact Edition, cannot be used on shared drives (at least not by multiple processes from different machines).
References:
Share Access Database on a Network Drive:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access-help/ways-to-share-an-access-database-HA010279159.aspx#BM3
SQL Server CE Cannot be used on a shared drive:
SQLCE 4 - EF4.1 Internal error: Cannot open the shared memory region
The ways sqlite locks databases means you have to be careful if there's a chance you'll have multiple sources trying to access the database. You either have to develop a waiting method, or a timeout, or something
We are looking at creating a custom ASP.NET application for a client, however they are a nonprofit and thus budget is limited.
We typically develop ASP.NET web and desktop apps to connect to a central SQl Server 200X database, ie with a full version of SQL Server, running on networked Windows Server. In this case we won't have a full version available.
Are there any issues with using SQL Server Express in this sort of arrangement? IIS and SQL Server Express would be running on the same physical server, serving up pages over the local Intranet to users.
Any real differences to be aware of in regards to development of the app itself or deployment? This will be a fairly standard app, with SQL mainly being used for a datastore with tables and SPs, nothing really SQL Server specific beyond that.
SQL Server Express edition should be fine for this scenario. It has all the core features of the full product, but as you said you are only really using it for data storage and some SPs, then you will not need any of the additional functionality available in the other versions (ie. reporting and analysis services). There are some limitations to the express version (the biggest being that the maximum database size is 4GB), but they should not really affect you unless your are building a very busy ASP.Net application.
Some public-facing websites use SQL Server Express as the database server (DotNetKicks being the only one I can remember at the moment) without issue.
The exact list of unsuported features in Express is at SQL Server Express Features:
Database mirroring
SQL Mail
Online restore
Fail-over clustering
Database snapshot
Distributed partitioned views
Parallel index operations
VIA protocol support
Mirrored media sets
Log shipping
Partitioning
Parallel DBCC
Address Windowing Extensions (AWE)
Parallel Create Index
Hot-add memory
Enhanced Read Ahead and Scan
Native HTTP SOAP access
Indexed views (materialized views)
SQL Mail and Database Mail
Partitioned views
Online Index Operations
SQL Server Agent and SQL Server Agent Service
SSIS, SSAS, OLAP/Data Mining
The SQL Server Express with Advanced Services Features supports a "subset of Reporting Services features".
In addtion there are the operational restrictions:
Express will use onyl one CPU core
Express will not grow the buffer pool over 1 GB no matter how much RAM you have
Express will not allow any database to grow over 4GB and will not put online (restore, attach) databases that are already over 4 GB.
The key problems you may run into are the operational restrictions (one core, 1 GB ram, 4GB each database) and the lack of SQL Agent, preventing any sort of job scheduling.
You should not really run into anything, its actually a full featured product that MS SQL Express
Here's a really basic comparison from Microsoft.