Share your experience: Provide a review of Dedicated Windows

Deleted User said 3 years, 3 months ago:

Share your thoughts with other customers. What was your experience like using the product? Be detailed and specific. What would you have wanted to know before you purchased the product?

bigbossman said 2 years, 11 months ago:

As far as the Virtual Dedicated Server goes…

Security:
(I will ignore this for now, because I have not got an answer back on a relatively new post that I put up about security updates.)

Ram & OS: (I am coming up on 2 years for me.)
512MB of ram is not a whole lot memory. 768MB of ram is better, but you cannot go higher than 768MB within the plans and you cannot even pay extra for more RAM. 1GB of ram would be an ideal entry point for me. Some of the other virtual dedicated hosting companies have a plan that offers 1GB & Windows Server 2008. I talked to a sales guy at Go Daddy on the phone. He told me that he is not made aware of any new plan offers or changes until the day before. Do not get me wrong, 512MB is not useless, but you end up doing all your dirty work at 1am to 5am. Dirty work as in some massive daily process that needs to run. Plus, you usually end up having recycle all services say 5:30am before someone jumps on your site. It can all be automated, so you should be able to sleep. During the business day you only have enough memory for a web application or client services to put it in other terms.

Here are services/programs that I run with 512MB.

Day Time Business Operations:
—————————–
(1) MS SQL Express 2005 w/Reporting Services installed and RAM memory limits set appropriately.

(2) My NET 2.0 Web Application utilizing MS SQL DB & Reporting Services Web Service plus a certain shell program for post processing reports from Reporting Services.

Thats all I can do during the business day without potential resource conflicts with clients. My client list you can count on two hands. Basically, my brother in law is marketing my services plus he gets to use my service for free.

Night Time AM Business Operations:
———————————-
(1) Regional data collection from the web using a NET 2.0 Application. This thing could use 512MB memory by itself if I leave it running. It has to be flexible and easy to adjust that means more memory. Yes, its a gentle scraping app. I made a new regular expression class which enhances the existing NET 2.0 regular expression class with an asynchronous option with timeout and abort features. I did this, so it does not misbehave if something unexpected happened. The application has to do analysis, cleaning, and categorization of the data before the application stores the data in the database. It is a slow process 15 to 20 minutes per day, so none of sources get overwhelmed. I have not even come close to maxing out the CPU or having a significant impact on it.

Summary:
——–
You can make money with 512MB of RAM. The site has generated revenue over the course of the last 6 months that we actually tried to market it. Being single, I have time and money to play around building stuff and coming up with ideas. If you work in development of information technology, you are still in the gold rush believe it or not. All the good ideas are not taken. You have to follow through of course, but YOU maybe be able to find cheap labor as in yourself, and there are a ton of free tools. I still have a day job, so I have not scored a Google level site yet, but that is in the plans. Not with this specific application, but from the experience gained by building it. Its kind of cool to have something to show that you own when you go for a job interview. Just make sure it works that day.

Off Topic Suggestions:
It would probably be a good idea to have something before you purchase a server and deploy it. Backup and offsite storage of source code is probably a good idea. Do not forget about Microsoft BizSpark. I would save it for something that you know will pay off.

Have a good day

mircea said 2 years, 11 months ago:

IIS + SQL server = very very slow

I have installed 2 ASP.NET applications and a SQL Server 2008 R2 Express to work with.

I run so slow, only with 2 users it was like 10 seconds response time from the server. Mainly I think from the memory swapping, CPU never got over 10%.

So this is not a workable solution for ASP.NET applications with SQL Server.

Also ther was a problem with the DNS servers configured on network adapter (not accesibile).

bigbossman said 2 years, 11 months ago:

Since, I will probably close out the site this year anyways. I figure that I would give you a little tour of the site. The following video was capture at a high bit rate. Then, I lowered it, because the file was to big. In the beginning of the video, I had some issues with Windows Media Encoder, but I figured out how to adjust it. This is an unedited video recording that is 26 minutes long (50MB).

http://www.dailyarrests.com/Server.wmv

Maybe this will give somebody a business idea in your area. I mainly deal with lawyers. The site is not real pretty, because my graphical imagination needs a little work. I basically used a template from Web Easy Professional to get my general layout. I kind of hacked the css and javascript to the way that I wanted it. Regardless of whether I wanted to go into business or not, I got strong armed by my sister to provide the information to my brother in law. He paid a competitor like $200+ a month for the information in label format for ONE county.

Enjoy

bigbossman said 2 years, 7 months ago:

I removed the video since it no longer in sync with the current Go Daddy offerings. I also posted the information in the wrong spot. You got to know how to click on all of those “Alls” on the community navigation. You know to navigate to the virtual dedicated area. Just a reminder for anybody using SQL Server 2005. I think the lifecycle support of SQL Server 2005 ends in April 2011. Microsoft’s site is hard for me to interpret. It would probably be a good idea to look at SQL Server 2008 Migration if you have not already. Do not forget about Microsoft BizSpark.

chrisg said 2 years, 7 months ago:

@bigbossman,

Sorry for the delay in responding to this. I just wanted to take moment to let you know we appreciate the update to this and thank you for taking the time to post the video tour for other community members to look at.

Also, thank you for that update about SQL Server 2005. I’m sure our development staff may already be aware and planning updates to our future Server accounts; but I will forward this info to them just to be sure. I’m sure other community members still using this on their own server accounts may appreciate this as well.

Christopher G.

briancplusplus said 2 years, 7 months ago:

Hey folks, my name is Brian and I’m a developer on the Dedicated and Virtual Dedicated products.

Our group automates the installs that happen after you buy the product or if you make a change to your product in the “My Account” interface. When you buy a new account, this automation includes picking the datacenter where it lands, making sure the hardware is correct, and installing the Operating System.

What do you all think of the current offerings? We now offer Windows 2008 R2 for Virtual Dedicated and for Dedicated we offer Windows 2003 Std/Web, Windows 2008 Std/Web, and Windows 2008 x64.

Are these good offerings? Is there anything you’d like to see in particular? Let us know what you think!

kevin2011 said 2 years, 5 months ago:

my vds down again for 1 hour

bigbossman said 2 years, 5 months ago:

Looks like Microsoft released SP4 for SQL Server 2005, so I think that everyone has more time now for SQL Server 2005.

chrisg said 2 years, 5 months ago:

@bigbossman,

We appreciate the update regarding the release of SP4 for SQL Server 2005. This information is truly appreciated.

@kevin2011,

Are you still encountering an issue with your server appearing down at this time? If so, I would recommend submitting a trouble ticket to our Server Support team for assistance. You will want to refer to the instructions provided in the following URL for submitting a trouble ticket:

http://support.godaddy.com/help/article/4596

Christopher G.

specialwebs said 1 year, 5 months ago:

| What would you have wanted to know before you purchased the product?

I wish I would have asked about the Service Level Agreement.
I would have liked to have know that it takes up to 24 hours to re-provision a server and 3 – 5 days to restore a backup. This is not a reasonable service level when trying to recover from a disaster.