From: Aaron Bartell
Here is where I got the $65 number from, which is an entirely
dedicated and virtualized OS hosted on a shared machine ...
I still fail to see the validity of the comparison. The offer from
www.hosting.com would be totally unsuitable for hosting an integrated
development environment. It's not a development platform. It's actually not
even suitable as a deployment platform except for a very small number of users.
As far as MS .Net development platforms are concerned, some developers are
saying they can't stand anything less than a 2.5 Ghz dual-core dedicated CPU and
8GB of RAM. A 600 Mhz micro partition with 1 GB of RAM would simply not work as
a development platform. At $65/month you only get the free edition of MS SQL
Server Express, which is constrained to just 1 GB RAM, and 10 GB of DB storage.
What kind of performance could you expect from a micro partition that is forced
to run a resource intensive workload like MS .Net and SQL Server on just 600
Mhz, and 1GB of RAM? My understanding is that the resource requirements of
aspx.net are comparable to those of JEE application servers like WAS. How would
Java perform under those kinds of constraints?
And if you don't need an entire virtual OS then you can go with
DreamHost at $8.95/month ...
Could you really trust your business to a company like that. Their come-on
offers are simply false. Unlimited terabyte storage? Unlimited terabyte
bandwidth? 100% uptime guarantee? I won't bother to repeat all the types of
"unlimited" features offered. It's simply false advertising. Maybe they don't
meter CPU, bandwidth, or storage but you can bet there are bottlenecks in their
capacities that constrain the actual amount of use. There's no mention of the
number of HTTP server threads allocated to customers, for example. It's like
advertising a genie in a bottle; perhaps a data center with enormous capacity
but you can bet there is something constraining its use. As far as the uptime
guarantee, you can bet that your service will not be up 100% of the time.
You'll have to go through the ticket report process to get a refund measured in
pennies. This is not a development platform either, so that comparison is not
valid either.
-Nathan
midrange.com
