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I'm looking for an ASP.NET and SQL Server host for a site I'm developing. Here's the important caveat though: I have a backup of a SQL database (.bak file) and need to be able to restore this database on the host.
Can someone refer me to a host where I have enough control over SQL Server that I can restore a database .bak file?
I will recommend AccuWebHosting.Com. I've been with them for 4 years now.
With the control panel - WebsitePanel, you can easily restore .bak (SQL backup files).
You can refer to this article about how to backup your SQL database using WebsitePanel.
http://www.websitepanel.net/documentation/users-guide/sql-server-databases/#BackingupandRestoringSQLServerDatabase
Gearhost.com allows you SQL Server Management Studio access. You need to get the dedicated server to be able to restore and backup your server yourself; otherwise you'll need to submit a ticket for them to do it. Their average response time from ticket inception to completion is about one hour (from experience).
I believe CrystalTech lets you use SQL Management Studio to manage you database.
I've used it in the past and they have great customer support.
Softsys Hosting also offers Management Studio access.
You can probably do restore from backup if they allow Management Studio access, right? I haven't tried myself, but I assume you can.
http://www.discountasp.net/ should do the trick.
SQL Hosting specifics: http://www.discountasp.net/sp_sqlhosting.aspx
You should give AppHarbor a look. It's free to get started, and while we don't currently provide the ability to restore back-up files, we have created a tool that uses SQL Server Bulk Copy to copy data fairly quickly.
(disclaimer, I'm co-founder of AppHarbor)
For Windows and MS SQL Server hosting, I use OpenHosting. Their SQL installs are complete, and you'd have access to the Management Studio to pull your restore, just as if it was a dedicate box.
You can restore backups at webhost4life. Can you explain why you need to restore a backup? A lot of the time you can just script your schema+data and run the script on the server.
SQL Management Studio won't allow you to restore database from a local file. The backup file should be accessible by SQL Server - this normally means that backup file should reside on the SQL Server itself.
Softsys Hosting allows you to upload your backup file though (using DotNetPanel). You can even zip it, to conserve traffic.
I would second webhost4life, i been with them less then a year, but it's been great.
It is also allows you to take database backups and restore, manage it trough sql management studio, good customer service, and very fast servers.
I am running with them my personal web forum (around 1k users and growing) and so far they been very good experience for me.
Heard many good things about CrystalTech as well
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I have an ASP.NET web app on a shared hosting server and a SQL Server database on a database server. I would like to backup and restore the database programmatically in the web app where the site owner can download/upload the backup file from a browser. Looking for a solution which works in medium trust. I think SMO (shared management objects libraries) requires full trust and not sure if it even meets my needs. Writing files on the database server, using a control panel or SSMS is not an option.
While I might be able to write SQL Scripts to do all this work, it's going to take some time to have it work reliably for any database. I was wondering if these kind of scripts or a suitable library is available.
Based on the shared hosting, and the desire to get backups on-demand, you may need to actually run a SQL query that essentially iterates all the metadata and raw data and generates a bunch of SQL INSERT statements.
The good news is, this is a well-solved problem. See this question: What is the best way to auto-generate INSERT statements for a SQL Server table? or just Google "SQL script generator". If you look at some of the open source projects out there, that might be the easiest code to integrate.
With the caveat, it might be worth giving your hosting company a call and just explaining your needs, especially if they are a smaller company. I used to be Dir of Engineering for a small web hosting company and we'd setup ad hoc solutions for folks all the time.
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It is unclear to me how cloudControl MySQLd addon works.
My understanding of MySQLd is that it is a MySQL server that can/will work with unlimited apps.
But since all addons are only app based, this could also mean that I cannot use the same MySQLd server on multiple apps.
Could anyone please help me understand if one MySQLd instance can be used with multiple apps hosted on cloudControl?
There are two concepts on the cloudControl PaaS. Applications and deployments. An application is basically just grouping developers and deployments together. Each deployment is a distinct running version of the app from a branch matching the deployment name. More details on this can be found in the Apps, Users and Deployments documentation.
All add-ons are always per deployment. We do this because this way we can provide all credentials as part of the runtime environment. This means you don't have to have credentials in version controlled files. Thich is a huge benefit when merging between branches, because you don't risk accidentally talking to e.g. the live database from a dev deployment. Also add-on credentials can change at any time at the add-on providers discretion.
For this reason separation between deployments makes a lot of sense. Usually your dev deployments also don't need the same database power as the production deployment for example. So you can easily use a smaller plan or even a shared database (e.g. MySQLs) for development. You can read more about how to use this feature inside your code in the Add-on documentation.
Also as explained earlier, add-on credentials are always provided as part of the runtime environment. Now credetials can change at any time at the add-on providers discretion. These changes are automatically provided in the environment and the app processes restarted. If you had hard coded the credentials as would be required for the second app, this would mean the app would probably experience downtime.
Last but not least, it's usually very bad practice to connect to the same database from two different code bases in different repositories, which would be the reason to have a second app. This causes all kinds of potential conflicts and dependencies that make code changes and database migrations extremely hard to maintain over time. The recommended way would be to have the data owned by one code base only and provide an API to access that data from the second code base.
All this being said, it is technically possible to connect multiple deployments or even apps to the same add-on (database or anything else) but highly advised against.
If you have a good reason to connect two apps/deployments to the same database I would suggest you manually launch an RDS instance at Amazon (MySQLd is based on RDS) and provide credentials for that through the custom config add-on to both of your apps/deployments.
I hope this answers your question and also explains the reasons.
I'm currently in the process of building our ASP.NET C# 3.5 Web site and I have been looking at Azure as our possible hosting environment and I had a couple of questions that I couldn't really find answers for on their website. I would appreciate if someone could help me get these figured out.
1) If I setup a single cloud server with my ASP.NET application & SQL server database, and the server went down, Would my application automatically get brought over to a new cloud server and continue to run? Or, am I required to manually move the data over to a new cloud server?
2) In the future, when I need to maintain more instances to handle the load, How hard is it to configure the database and sessions to work across all of the instances?
3) Do I still get remote desktop access on the cloud servers?
4) Are there any other cloud hosting provider that you would recommend over Azure for Windows hosting?
Yes, there is automatic failover and backup
You change a number in a config file, and click save
Not currently
I haven't done a ton of research, but Azure is pretty impressive. It all depends on what your needs are.
If you're a powershell guy, you can write a powershell to swap out the config files for you, there's a pretty good walk through to do that here: http://channel9.msdn.com/learn/courses/Azure/Deployment/DeployingApplicationsinWindowsAzure/Exercise-2-Using-PowerShell-to-Manage-Windows-Azure-Applications/
If you're a cmd file guy, you can use the csmanage.exe to swap config files, downloadable here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazuresamples.
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I am tasked with moving quite a few web apps including the databases to new servers, they are ASP.NET. I was not the one to create and setup these originally so I must try to figure out what exactly I need to replicate in order to not break anything and so the customers have no idea that anything was moved.
Does anyone have any tips for this, or know any automated ways?
Is there any software that can help with this?
I know the web app sends emails, so I will need to setup SMTP and it connects to a database so that I also will need to move. I suppose I should do this at night and take down the servers so I can move the database at it's latest state...
Any tips or tricks?
This might help: IIS 6.0 Migration Tool
"The Internet Information Services 6.0
Migration Tool is a command line tool
that automates several of the steps
needed to move a Web application from
IIS 4.0, IIS 5.0 or IIS 6.0 to a clean
installation of Internet Information
Services (IIS) 6.0 and Windows Server
2003.
The tool transfers configuration data,
Web site content, and application
settings to a new IIS 6.0 server if
desired, or can move just application
settings using the copy functionality.
"
I don't think it will help with the database migration, though.
Here's a link to more detailed information about using the tool.
May I suggest setting up the new servers in a staging environment. Allow business users to verify the functionality in the staging environment before flipping the switch and going live. Once you are ready, then bring over a fresh copy of the data. As far as the emails go... you should be fine with ASP.NET but some classic ASP programs require COM components in order to send email.
The route I've taken in the past is to do a live/current copy (whatever that entails) of $CURRENT_SERVER to $NEW_SERVER. If the DB is not moving, just make sure $NEW_SERVER can reach $DB_SERVER, and that it will continue to run once copied.
Then update DNS to point to $NEW_SERVER.
After some period of time (2-3x the TTL for the DNS record), remove the old server.
We just went through the same thing--bought a new server and had to transfer ASP.NET sites + Databases to the new server. We experienced problems with the IIS Migration tool, so we followed a "staging environment" approach, as stated in Berkshire's answer and had much success. When all issues are cleared from the staging environment, you can make it "live" with much confidence.
One other thing to watch out for is that you'll have to skim the ASP & VB/C# code for any hard-keyed connection strings to the database. These will have to change to reference the new location of the database.
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I was just assigned to do a CMS using ASP.net 3.5 and MySQL. I am kind of new to ASP.NET development (quite sufficient with C#) and I am wondering what major ASP.NET and general .NET features I am losing when I don't have the option to use Microsoft SQL Server.
I know already from quick Googling that I lose LINQ (and I was really looking forward to using this to build my model layer!), but I am not sure what other handy features I will lose. Since I've been relying on ASP.net tutorials which assume that you use MS SQL Server, I feel a chunk of my ASP.net knowledge just become invalid.
Thanks!
You can leverage MySql in a number of ORMs, one of which is NHibernate. For the most part you can treat it as if you were running on SQL Server or Oracle. And with Linq2NHibernate, you can get nice LINQ syntax.
You'd lose the SqlDataSource control, but some would argue that it would actually be a blessing :)
And of course you'd lose Linq2SQL. EntityFramework will have 3rd party adapters MySql, Oracle and a few others soon after release.
You do not lose LINQ, you lose LINQtoSQL. LINQ itself is more generic as it can be used on anything that implements iQueryable.
You lose the SqlDataSource, not a big deal.
You lose some of the integration the server explorer does for you with sql server, again not a big deal.
As far as im concerned you dont lose anything very important, and you shouldnt be losing any of your .net knowledge. Most examples use sql server as a default but they can easily be changed to use another database.
Also there are a few open source .net CMS packages out there already that use MySql take a look at cuyahoga
As a consequence of losing notification services, you also lose SqlCacheDependency
Some things that come to mind:
asp.net has nice "automatic" user management (authentication) system. I think it only goes with SQL Server, but there might be a way to make it work on other DBs. The tutorials assume SQL Server usually (or the built in file based DB for development)
Not related to asp.net, but useful for any project is SQLCLR, which I find a great addition to sql server. Lets you delegate logic you write in the business level (supporting dll or classes) to sql server in the from of a SP, but the SP is written in vb.net/c#
Notification services