I've been really busy for the last month or so with some changes in my business that have lead me to have, once again, many late nights and looking at how others manage their DotNetNuke business overall. Part of the business growth I have had has been from resellers who are wanting to have a closer relationship with someone who knows about hosting and managing DotNetNuke and so far through no fault of my own, I've become quite knowledgeable in this area.
Now, I'm not talking about big hosting web farms, and multi million hits per month sites.... sure there are a few of those around, but I'm talking about the 95% of 'us' who are the business owners, resellers and hosters wanting to provide some good DNN hosting for clients.
I started off hosting websites back in 1999, with webcentral and then webtrader who was sold off to destra - ozhosting. I purchased an RU1 and hosted with IPrimus and then moved to OzHosting and then outgrew them, moved to Queensland and now, I have committed to a full 47 RU rack space in at the GlobalSwitch datacentre where we are currently setting up some new servers. It's been a big step for me, and it's really a case of finding quality people you trust and you can work with and we offer services that don't compete, but enhance the value to our clients.
I have three servers, and two which are being recommissioned to provide some very slick hosting, as well as 6ru of hardware and software firewall for clients who are hosted within this environment. Also, the IT guys I work with are high security authorised for Government projects and offer extensive skills and knowledge in this area.
This leaves me to deploy DNN hosting as I, a business person who uses this for my own business, would recommend and put in place for my clients and resellers. It's not the normal type of hosting with a plan that's got things no one really ever looks at or cares about, but it does have simply great DNN hosting for those who just want to use this framework for their business model.
The type of hosting is also quite different to many other 'hosters' - I can actually provide clients and resellers with some very nice, commercial grade, clean and optimsed DNN portals, which, if theya reselling as child portals, are nicely white labelled and deployed for them. I care about every one of my client's and how their sites perform and it's been interesting to hear from people who struggle to keep up with modules, what's good, what's not, how can they find solutions for clients, etc, and I try hard to provide an environment where we can test modules before deploying on the live server and investigate just what someone needs, and come up with proven structures I know will be easy to maintain.
This has only come around through having had to deal with lousy dnn builds and good ones, customers who know nothing and those who know enough to be dangerous, people coming in from different languages, cold fusion and php as an example, and of course - the most costly one - ... experience.. mistakes I've made and things I would have done differently if I'd only known. And, after close on 4.5 years of working and trying to get the most out of DNN, I'm pleased to say that we will be offering some specialised hosting for those who want that little bit more from their DNN solution. It's not going to be for everyone, and I don't mind that either, but I do want to offer something a little unique, and in particular, those who resell DNN, the option to see what can be done, they might not be aware of. It probably won't be the cheapest DNN hosting, but then again, you only get what you pay for.
Now, having said all this, I've acquired some clients from a company that no longer wishes to offer hosting as part of their business model. And I've been moving 20 or so databases, some over 1.5gb and hundreds of megs of data files over to our servers while we organise their new location. It''s been very interesting to see how they managed by others, and I was pleased to see that moving them wasn't hard. I have only one site that's giving me a little grief and we're finalising the SSL on some of these for now and I can confidently say that DNN is one of the best applications to move from one location to another.
Of course it makes a difference when you have full control over the servers, but I would like to think that these clients won't even know they've switched servers (of course they are aware of being moved) but we can relatively seamlessly move them from one place to another. The easiest site to move was the DNN 1 site of course - since there no machine keys but the methods are still the same.
When I have moved each one, what I've done is put in the new url first in the portal alias table. You can do it after, but it's just one less step to do via the database, and then I've zipped up the site completely, and backed up the site database. I did these in 2 separate rar files. I simply uploaded to new location and in these instances, I actually created a new database using the naming convention we use on our servers, and restored the backups to the new database. In each instance, I checked that the database properties were set to SIMPLE and that the growth of the database was set to 10MB, NOT 10%. I dont' have restrictions on the size of the db's but these two simple steps help set the db to be more efficient in size. After the database was attached, I then went and shrank the db to it's minimum size.
Once attached, I set the users as per my server in the User table. Everything was done the same way, with consistency, following the same pattern each time so I was confident that the sites would be in line with how we do things on our servers. We back up our databases every day for 14 days, and then they are deleted, and of course when we're upgrading, the sites get backed up prior to that 'upgrade' click occuring.
Our clients don't manage their own sites except adding content in through DNN - they don't need FTP, although a couple have it when they are uploading large files for their store downloads, but that's not really the normal procedure. We handle all of this aspect, so the client never needs to do anything but login and manage the site.
When it comes to sending email - depending on the amount of subscribers they have, we generally recommend they use a third party solution which sits on our servers and we have other systems in place to manage this.
This has, by far been the biggest step I've taken towards hosting and I'm thrilled with the response, with 3 people wanting to have their own servers to manage their larger sites, and we can do that for them in our secure network.
What I had thought of using was the DotNetPanel control panel for it's convenience. I've had a look at it lately and am impressed with how far it's come since it's early days, so will be looking at that closely in the next two weeks.
Apart from moving these sites, I'm also working on rebuilding and having new name servers. Currently we're running a windows master and linux slave name server and it's not the idea situation, so we're still toying with the decision of ... linux or windows for our name servers. Our mail server is linux and it's been pretty good, but we also have a free version of smarter mail handling our email marketing delivery so there is still some thinking time as we create our network diagram on how things will work.
For child portals, there's been a very cool script written, still being done, that actually outputs the traffic into a dos window - of each site, but we're testing the calculation process - eg.. does it account for images as well. We're going this way because our host headers in IIS generally have one parent portal, and several child portals but they are full domains, not domain/child setup, and this installation runs in one application pool, I don't assign different application pools to child portals and I don't put a child portal with a fulll domain in an separate instances of IIS. - Whether or not that's the right thing to do, well it's worked for me. As a site gets larger, or if we have a child portal that needs to grow to a single installation, we can do that too, it takes a little bit of time but it's certainly doable and we have been succesfull in doing this in the past.
Often when it's time to move from one hosted environment to another, it's a good time to reassess the site - do you upgrade or do you build from new.. I have personally found that sites don't upgrade as well as I would like them to. There is usually some legacy code somewhere along the line to make a 'non coders' life miserable and I prefer to design from scratch again, and even on larger sites, it's proven to be a more efficient way of doing things. And here's why - when you have a site that has become quite large and unwieldy in page size, modules on pages, page count, and in general sluggish and non responsive, the time it takes to work on getting it 'back in line' is often not worth the time, when, with the later versions of DNN, the modules available, the ability to import and manage users is much better, you might find that starting from scratch is quicker. I tend to spend more time looking at how to improve the management of the sites for larger ones that have become too slow.
I am not one to simply upgrade a website because of the latest version of dnn coming out.. ... been there, done that.... and if you've got nothing to do with your time that sit on the forums and chase up why something is not working as expected, good luck - email me your answers... I'm looking at DNN as a commercial decision. There is nothing wrong with the attitude - "if it's not broken.. leave it". I used to try to keep up to date but now running with too many sites and businesses to make that a practical option. But what I do make note of are good builds... and it's been a while since we've seen them I'm afraid to say.. Not enough testing is going on now. I do alot of testing but we have our own Commercial Grade build of DNN which is kept up to date and patched rather than having to wait for 6 - 8 weeks for builds and updates. I can't rely on poorly tested builds any more which we're seeing more of unfortunately. I don't know why there is such little testing done now based on the problems we're seeing in the forums.
My own site is still DNN 3.2.2 - build we never should have had... but I am going to be rebuilding to the latest brand spanking new DNN version in the near future along with several other sites. did you note that word.. rebuild. I take this approach because I'm trying to run a business here, and while I don't code, I do have access to some of the most talented guys around, but I've seen how nice a clean installation is, and in reality, how much quicker it's getting to build a site. I feel there is alot of quality in the overall setup and management enhancements with DNN. Now, of course I'm not talking about huge portals with thousands of pages, but seriously, if I had 200 pages on a site I think with what I know, and the sites I've been deploying, I could cut that down substantially, cut the module usage down, and use the copy and import functions that exist to rebuild a site. That's just my opinion OK and that's all I've got to offer.
So, I'm expecting in the next month I will be setup to offer some very good DotNetNuke hosting, targetted to resellers who want to just sell and have the funkiest and coolest sites around, through to clients who just want DNN to do all they expect it to and know that I run my own sites with them.. I believe if it's good enough for me, it's good enough for my clients. I've spent alot of time finding the right environment to suit our needs and grow with us, and the feedback and support has been great. I'll be introducing them all as soon as I get settled. The next two weeks will be taken up with site migration, so I am not sure how much I'll be around until then.
Cheers
Nina