Best option for leasing a virtual Server 2008 in "the cloud"

I'm trying to help someone find a service that will, for a monthly charge, host a basic virtual Server 2008 machine capable of running SQL express and IIS to host a web application published to the internet. Stateside telephone based support would be huge as well.

The application is a web based time clock for a hotel management group with 15 locations, about 250 employees clocking in and out at various times of day... so up to 30 or so browser sessions at a time. being handled by this server, nothing drastic.

They were hosting this application on their physical office server but local internet outages and an old office building have caused unacceptable down time.

 

Amazon provides a top notch cloud service. A lot of businesses use it.

 

Amazon Web Services all the way

 

I have a very limited understanding of the AWS services options. I use it to host some static podcast content on S3 but I don't see any options for it hosting an asp.net web application with an sql database. Maybe I don't understand the terminology well enough.

I'm out of my element here and usually my clients have the understanding to do this on their own... The next time I have a client that does this themselves, I will ask them to explain how they are doing it to me.

 

Not necessarily top notch, but GoDaddy offers an ASP.NET hosting option with SQL server. I use GoDaddy for my "MondialQV.com" website (to keep track of my vehicle maintenance) as well as a personal family website that I created. Both are written in .NET with SQL back-ends.

I use Dreamhost for some non-asp.net stuff and like them, but unless you are willing to switch technologies (java, PHP, MySQL, etc.), Dreamhost may not be of much benefit for you.

I'm in the process of evaluating Microsoft's cloud services. It's not cheap, but it appears that they may offer what you need.

Edit: I just read up on AWS -- it looks great. The pricing is a little difficult to figure out, though. I'm going to look into migrating one of my sites from GoDaddy to AWS as a test.

 

For the storage (s3) the costs are nearly impossible to predict, with the way they save local copies around...

my customer tried GoDaddy but ultimately couldn't get the support they needed.

 

I'm a Rackspace zealot.

 

Dave,

Are you looking for a scalable and reliable platform that will support a heavy duty web application?

Or, something more like a traditional web hosting service for small business where you can run a website w/SQL DB on the back end?

When you say "virtual server", it sort of has two connotations. AWS is pretty heavy duty. It's not cheap, but their back-end system is top notch. A lot of serious and important applications run on the platform. Start here

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Running Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server

If you are talking more on the order of a domain (and you don't care if it's a shared server) where you can run IIS and SQL server, then there are a ton of options. Everyone hates GoDaddy but I find them to be decent and use them for some small sites. There are also literally tens of thousands of hosting companies that offer this. I find they come and go and get bought by each other regularly... so you sort of have to keep on top of who is good. I've tried 5 or 6 over the years that were great at first, only to suck later. I stay with GoDaddy for light duty stuff just because they are a known quantity. It's not the greatest perhaps, but it's been the same since I started, so I know what to expect.

I would also suggest looking into Microsoft Azure

Windows Azure: Microsoft's Cloud Platform | Cloud Hosting | Cloud Services

They have a calculator where you can tell it how big of a database, how much bandwidth and how much processor power and it will give you a real-time monthly price.


The nice thing about Azure and AWS is that if you are doing some "high end $h!t", you can change your service on the fly and immediately get more memory, bandwidth, storage or processor power, because it's all virtual. You can add servers until the load is met - same with AWS. Very very easy.

But not cheap

 

Try rackspace.com - great services and support. I've got a few cloud servers there.