I'm from a web agency in the UK and we are just starting to develop sites in Umbraco and I'm curious as to what the best hosting solution/company may be. Assuming that we will be hosting a number of Umbraco sites and installs do we need a dedicated server? Or virtual? A certain specification?
If you are hosting a number of websites it would make sense to have a virtual private server where you can control the whole environment. This would also assume you know how to set up the VPS and maintain it.
At "some point" Umbraco will be releasing it's Concorde (software as a service) which would solve the hosting problem, but until that comes around you could consider setting up a VPS on Azure to host your sites.
Thanks very much Matt that's really helpful. You are the second person to suggest Azure actually. Really interesting about Concorde too! Very exciting.
When you say assuming that I know how to set it up and maintain it what do you mean? I am a web designer/front ender so not massively into server side setup etc. Do you think I'll be able to follow the guide on the blog you sent and get it all up and running. If not then who do you think I could ask to set this up for us the way we want it? The agency would be willing to pay for someone to do it, we need it all setting up ASAP really.
Well, plenty of folks on here can do that, might be worth you putting a post in the Umbraco jobs section and seeing who is available, or browse the certified partners on Umbraco.com and pick an agency.
Alternatively, see how far you get setting that up yourself, and if you get stuck, just post on twitter/this forum.
A lot will depend on the volume of traffic that you expect for the sites you're going to be building. The majority of the web dev agencies I work with have one or more dedicated servers for all of the small/medium sites (some of these host quite a lot of sites), and then the larger higher traffic sites usually have their own dedicated server. For really large /high traffic sites or ones where you expect surges in traffic you'd probably want to look at some kind of cloud/load balanced solution to ensure maximum availability.
Thanks for all of your advice. We have, mainly based on cost implications, gone with a virtual server option with South West Broadband in the end who have given us all that we need for now and then we can grow our hosting as we grow. They were recommended on the Wiki here and they have been really helpful to be honest. Our issue here is that it's only me at the moment trying to grow the team and whilst I do have some some technical server knowledge I am not able to setup and maintain a server myself.
So we'll see how we get on, it depends on how many Umbraco sites we build I guess.
Now that we have our VPS setup (thank goodness) and have a fresh install on Umbraco running on the server we have our next hurdle before being able to work on the website in question. Our freelancer has started to work on a local install of Umbraco and now wants to link to the live DB on the server. He then wants to upload the files periodically so that the client can 'watch' the site develop. How do we go about doing this please? We don't want to overwrite his doctypes and templates but are we going to have to? He has tried putting the new DB connection info into the web.config file but can't log in as admin. Is this a permissions issue?
Hosting advice please?
Hello,
I'm from a web agency in the UK and we are just starting to develop sites in Umbraco and I'm curious as to what the best hosting solution/company may be. Assuming that we will be hosting a number of Umbraco sites and installs do we need a dedicated server? Or virtual? A certain specification?
Thanks,
Deb
Here are the requirements:
http://our.umbraco.org/documentation/Installation/system-requirements
If you are hosting a number of websites it would make sense to have a virtual private server where you can control the whole environment. This would also assume you know how to set up the VPS and maintain it.
At "some point" Umbraco will be releasing it's Concorde (software as a service) which would solve the hosting problem, but until that comes around you could consider setting up a VPS on Azure to host your sites.
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/free-trial/
http://blogs.technet.com/b/chrisavis/archive/2013/06/21/building-a-web-server-vm-that-lives-in-windows-azure.aspx
Thanks very much Matt that's really helpful. You are the second person to suggest Azure actually. Really interesting about Concorde too! Very exciting.
When you say assuming that I know how to set it up and maintain it what do you mean? I am a web designer/front ender so not massively into server side setup etc. Do you think I'll be able to follow the guide on the blog you sent and get it all up and running. If not then who do you think I could ask to set this up for us the way we want it? The agency would be willing to pay for someone to do it, we need it all setting up ASAP really.
Thanks :)
Well, plenty of folks on here can do that, might be worth you putting a post in the Umbraco jobs section and seeing who is available, or browse the certified partners on Umbraco.com and pick an agency.
Alternatively, see how far you get setting that up yourself, and if you get stuck, just post on twitter/this forum.
:)
A lot will depend on the volume of traffic that you expect for the sites you're going to be building. The majority of the web dev agencies I work with have one or more dedicated servers for all of the small/medium sites (some of these host quite a lot of sites), and then the larger higher traffic sites usually have their own dedicated server. For really large /high traffic sites or ones where you expect surges in traffic you'd probably want to look at some kind of cloud/load balanced solution to ensure maximum availability.
Thanks for all of your advice. We have, mainly based on cost implications, gone with a virtual server option with South West Broadband in the end who have given us all that we need for now and then we can grow our hosting as we grow. They were recommended on the Wiki here and they have been really helpful to be honest. Our issue here is that it's only me at the moment trying to grow the team and whilst I do have some some technical server knowledge I am not able to setup and maintain a server myself.
So we'll see how we get on, it depends on how many Umbraco sites we build I guess.
Many thanks though,
Deb
Now that we have our VPS setup (thank goodness) and have a fresh install on Umbraco running on the server we have our next hurdle before being able to work on the website in question. Our freelancer has started to work on a local install of Umbraco and now wants to link to the live DB on the server. He then wants to upload the files periodically so that the client can 'watch' the site develop. How do we go about doing this please? We don't want to overwrite his doctypes and templates but are we going to have to? He has tried putting the new DB connection info into the web.config file but can't log in as admin. Is this a permissions issue?
Thanks,
Deb
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