I will be hosting my website in the next few months and doing more testing and I was having trouble finding a place to host the site that allows enough space for my sqlserver2005 database. I am estimating that the database will be around 40-50GB. Most hosting companies only give about 500MB for the database. Does anyone know of a company that provides more space? Also, is SQL Express production ready, or is it just for developing applications? If it is production ready, is there any "major" performace impact in using it over the full version. The reason I am asking is because hosting companies only give 500MB for a database, but alot more space for the web page. If I can put the SQLExpress file in the App_Data folder, then I will have more space. Does this even sound like it will work? Opinions are appreciated!
this is just off the top of my head, but I would think that, either more web page space, or more SQL Server space would always be available for a price, from a hosting company.
With previous hosting companies, once I'd reached the max, I was told that I could buy more space if I wanted.
|||Thanks for the reply. From the companies I have looked at, they do offer more space but it only comes in small chucks(500MB) for an additional $5-$10 per month. I'm sure they would be more than happy to give me 50GB
, but it would be hard on the wallet.
I just realized that if I use SQL Express I cannot do hot backups. So I guess that is out of the question. But I'm still wondering what companies everyone else uses for hosting. Does anyone know of a place that allows for more storage for the database?
|||A 40-50GB database is pretty large for a hosting company. You might want to consider something more along the lines of a VPS at that point.
|||What is a VPS? To me 50G isn't that big. I mean storage is cheap these days. I work with multi-terabyte databases every day so I guess I expected a hosting company to support a 50G database lol. Thanks!!
||| VPS = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_private_server
Thanks for the info. I did a google search and found many places that should work out.
|||40-50G is a very small database when used as a data warehouse, ERP, etc. But for a typical web service that is actually extremely large. Remember that only a couple years ago that large hosting plans were for serving up 4-10GB of data transfer per MONTH. So having 40-50GB of data would be extremely odd to try and place in a shared hosing environment where the server is trying to handle 10,000+ websites.
Even a VPS may be too small for your needs, but it's definately a step up from a shared hosting plan. Of course if it is too small (or you outgrow it), it's usually trivial to move the VPS to it's own dedicated machine (or a larger machine). It's normally just copying a few files, and then changing a few configuration settings in the VPS software to allow your VPS to hog the whole box for itself.
|||I think that VPS is a good place to start. The database will be smaller when I go live, but I expect it to grow up to 50GB in a short amount of time. I just want to make sure I have enough room and I have the flexibility to add more storage space for less cost then the $10 for 500MB that I can get with shared storage plans. Thanks for all the good info!!
