So i found several questions on SO about ASP.NET and hosting, but none of them (as far as i could find) quite answered my question.
Basically, I'd like to be able to temporarily deploy websites I work on to a server so that I can verify that the deployment process goes okay. Essentially, I'm looking for a "trial" hosting that doesn't require a follow up purchase; temporary hosting.
Does anyone know of any such thing? OR, would I be better off just getting myself a separate computer that I "host" from home and deploy to that?
Have a look at https://www.gearhost.com
I use them for my projects and they have free plan which is not limited in time, just resources.
https://youtu.be/rgAWMl-gccM
You can use reliable they come with a 15 day money back guarantee. So if you think you can do what you need to do in 15 days then you can do this.
However you probably will see need to pay first and then request your money back. I would think most will do that I never seen a hosting site yet where they give you X days without any sort of registration and at least put a credit card down.
15 Day Money Back Policy(Reliable Policy)
If for any reason within the first 15
days of your period with us you wish
you cancel your account, then we will
issue a full refund with no questions
asked. To request a refund please
submit an account cancellation ticket
using our billing portal at
http://payments.reliablesite.net. In
the reason for cancellation please be
sure to list a request for your
refund. If no request is listed no
refund will be issued. Please note
that domain names, domain transfers,
and SSL certificates, dedicated
servers, and virtual private servers
are non-refundable.
Won't you need hosting after? I am unclear why you want to check it on a server to make it sure it works but then take it down and not host it anymore.
Related
I work for an advertising agency working with several clients who we are building and managing wordpress websites for. One issue that arises every time with a new install, is the issue with emails not sending/receiving. We usually solve this by installing an SMTP plugin and set it up using the clients Office 365 email account or whatever provider they have.
The problem is that this is a little time consuming, as well as some of our clients either don´t want to give away their account information/they don't know their account information/they change passwords and forms stop working.
We need a stable email solution that we can use on a wide spectrum of client pages, and that we hopefully don´t need to set up every time we make a new webpage. Does anyone have any solutions/suggestions for this?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Before I get into the recommendation, WordPress should use your servers default sendmail configuration so it’s possible something is misconfigured here as it should work out of the box.
But if you want something a little more bulletproof I recommend SendGrid.
One of the problems with all your sites using the same mail server is if one is blacklisted for something the others go down. With SendGrid, which is free for 10k send a month I think, you can issue an api key for each site and if one has an issue it you can easily identify it in SendGrid.
I have setup dozens of API Keys and the plug-in. It’s fast and simple and takes about 5 minutes in total. They have great delivery, detailed reports and are cheap even if you need a lot of sends.
You can Signup for an account and use the SendGrid plugin from the Wordpress repository.
I set up a free domain on 000webhost.com
I am using this as a web server to receive data from SIM908+arduino setup and store it in the database. Then display it on a web page.
I am sending the data from the SIM908 using HTTP GET requests. Basically I am sending two pieces of information, one is the location (lat and long) and other is a string. Both are sent using GET requests. The problem is very unusual so bear with me. EVERYTHING WORKS FINE, for a while. After several GET requests are sent, for some reason, 000webhost just deactivates my domain. I simply cannot access it. Every time I try to browse to the page it times out. It remains like this for around 7-8 hours after which the domain works fine again. I tried another hosting byethost.com, but GET requests from the SIM908 do not work there at all. Everything is 100% OK. The code, arduino setup everything is fine. My question is why is 000webhost stopping my domain? Really need a good answer or at least some direction, i am completely lost.
**NOTE: Please don't suggest POST method unless you explicitly know how to perform a POST operation using SIM908 AT commands, as far as I know it's not possible.
You are using the free webhost which has limitations. They will block you if your site is getting too much requests. Just read the limitations of free accounts with the server.
Look for a better free service or buy one. There is no issue with sim900 or arduino.
The following hosting service providers might be better than the one you are currently using in terms of limitations
Host Buddy You would get two months free
Free Hostia
Free Hosting .eu
I am building a web site for a sports club. The club is not interested in moving their hosting to a different web host, so I'm stuck with the current host. I deployed the new web application to the host, but after a few hours of testing it became obvious something was acting weird with regards to logins and the session state.
Whenever I spent more than 10 minutes idle, all of a sudden my MVC Verification Tokens would stop decrypting. I went into IIS and set the machine key to a static value, and this problem went away, but it became obvious that they had the ASP.NET idle timeout setting set to 10 minutes. Which means that every 10 minutes InProc session data would be destroyed if there was no activity on the site. I filed a support ticket with the host, but they are unwilling to change that setting for me on my app pool, stating "The setting can't be changed on the server at this time as increasing this could affect the performance off(sic) the server".
The club is somewhat small, at most 500 members of the club and very few of the members will be accessing the site often, so I can pretty much guarantee that the 10 minute timeout will be happening multiple times a day, and I have session timeouts set to 60 minutes, so it won't be a good idea to have the site clear sessions if the sole user of the site at a given time is idle for 10 minutes.
My first thought was to use SQL session storage. I've never used it, but I know it exists. However, one caveat that exists is that we are limited to 350mb of SQL storage. While this is probably more than the site will need right now, I imagine down the line we might come close to hitting the limit. I don't anticipate storing much data in the session, only a few things when interacting with paypal and shopping carts (maybe a system message here or there as well), so perhaps this isn't a huge concern?
We do have unlimited disk space, so another alternative I thought about was to perhaps write a custom disk-based session storage solution. Is there any reason this might not be a better idea than SQL?
And finally, I had a totally off-the-wall "oh god I can't believe I'm thinking about doing this" idea, which would be to have an AJAX call on every page periodically (say, every 8 minutes) "ping" a non-cached lightweight MVC action just to keep the server alive. This would probably work, I think, except for the one scenario where someone:
goes to the shopping page and creates a cart
gets transferred to paypal
spends 10+ minutes on the paypal screen for whatever reason while nobody else is on the site
comes back to see their cart disappear.
In this instance I might just move carts to the database anyway.
So... thoughts, comments, suggestions? I'm really frustrated about the host not letting me change this setting and my first instinct would be to find another host, but as I said before, the club has some strange attachment to the host and doesn't want to move somewhere else.
Thanks in advance!
A few thoughts:
On the problem: It's common for sessions to be 'lost' on Load Balancing systems. This could possibly be fixed by moving to a single designated server (if the hosting company isn't doing this now and provides the option
Cookie sessions: If you're using .Net Membership, you can change the login process to use cookies. This comes with the obvious some users dont allow cookies pitfall. Again, a consideration. Currently working on a school site where they want users to remain logged in.
** With Cookies your Login is stable, but your sessions will not be any better kept. So you're out of luck carrying much to count on in the Session State.
The end result is that you can track users by IP or Cookie, but unless this is a fixable Load Balancing problem, you're heading toward a Session-less application.
I build ASP.NET websites (hosted under IIS 6 usually, often with SQL Server backends and forms authentication).
Clients sometimes ask if I can check whether there are people currently browsing (and/or whether there are users currently logged in to) their website at a given moment, usually so the can safely do a deployment (they want a hotfix, for example).
I know the web is basically stateless so I can't be sure whether someone has closed the browser window, but I imagine there'd be some count of not-yet-timed-out sessions or something, and surely logged-in-users...
Is there a standard and/or easy way to check this?
Jakob's answer is correct but does rely on installing and configuring the Membership features.
A crude but simple way of tracking users online would be to store a counter in the Application object. This counter could be incremented/decremented upon their sessions starting and ending. There's an example of this on the MSDN website:
Session-State Events (MSDN Library)
Because the default Session Timeout is 20 minutes the accuracy of this method isn't guaranteed (but then that applies to any web application due to the stateless and disconnected nature of HTTP).
I know this is a pretty old question, but I figured I'd chime in. Why not use Google Analytics and view their real time dashboard? It will require minor code modifications (i.e. a single script import) and will do everything you're looking for...
You may be looking for the Membership.GetNumberOfUsersOnline method, although I'm not sure how reliable it is.
Sessions, suggested by other users, are a basic way of doing things, but are not too reliable. They can also work well in some circumstances, but not in others.
For example, if users are downloading large files or watching videos or listening to the podcasts, they may stay on the same page for hours (unless the requests to the binary data are tracked by ASP.NET too), but are still using your website.
Thus, my suggestion is to use the server logs to detect if the website is currently used by many people. It gives you the ability to:
See what sort of requests are done. It's quite easy to detect humans and crawlers, and with some experience, it's also possible to see if the human is currently doing something critical (such as writing a comment on a website, editing a document, or typing her credit card number and ordering something) or not (such as browsing).
See who is doing those requests. For example, if Google is crawling your website, it is a very bad idea to go offline, unless the search rating doesn't matter for you. On the other hand, if a bot is trying for two hours to crack your website by doing requests to different pages, you can go offline for sure.
Note: if a website has some critical areas (for example, writing this long answer, I would be angry if Stack Overflow goes offline in a few seconds just before I submit my answer), you can also send regular AJAX requests to the server while the user stays on the page. Of course, you must be careful when implementing such feature, and take in account that it will increase the bandwidth used, and will not work if the user has JavaScript disabled).
You can run command netstat and see how many active connection exist to your website ports.
Default port for http is *:80.
Default port for https is *:443.
If not, are there any fundamental limitations of the service that prevent one from being built?
In response to Garys answer. "If you're hosting your app on EC2, it'll be fine"
Even if you're hosting your application on EC2 you should not really use SimpleDB to store session state. It provides an "eventually consistent" guarantee, so if you PUT something there is no guarantee that you will see the item on your next GET.
see: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonSimpleDB/2007-11-07/DeveloperGuide/index.html?EventualConsistencySummary.html
This is fine when you want to use simpledb to do indexing on data that does not need to be immediately up to date and can be reconciled later, but in the case of session state, you'd likely want something with ACID guarantees (like SQL Server) as you want to know that once you have committed something you will get it back on the next read.
This obviously depends on your requirements, but most people use session state to store shopping cart items or similar. Your site visitors will soon get upset if things appear to go missing from thier cart, then re-add them and then discover they have added the same item twice when they come to pay.
There's a C# library for working with SDB.
If you want to roll your own, the API, WSDL and other documentation can be found at http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/#resources.
It's a pretty straight forward API that rides over HTTP. The hardest part is writing the signing code. There's plenty of implementations in other languages.
As for using it for session state, there's a huge speed difference between using SimpleDB from EC2 and anywhere else on the internet. If you're hosting your app on EC2, it'll be fine, otherwise, it'll be brutally slow.
You could base it off this MySQL provider:
http://harry-kimpel.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!CAA619CB4C4D1B6C!342.entry