I have five websites currently hosted with some other hosting provider. I am here to ask few questions that enable me to choose proper plan for me.

Currently my total used space is 5 GB (Web Disk Space, SQL Database Space, Email storage). In future it could not be more that 8 GB.

While hosted public websites are html based, these sites also have web based software used by manager level persons at my company. I am using ASP Classic and ASP.net for my web applications. I am using SQL database and MS Access database. Using total 240 email addresses.

My basic concern is speed. My application developed in ASP and ASP.net accessed from allover the world but only by our company's managers to see few reports. With current hosting provider, the managers are regularly complaining about slow server performance and downtime on each 4-5 days. The support at current hosting provider is very good, but for speed they blaming on my internet connection. Most of our persons have 512mb DSL connection.

At HMS, I personally prefer aspnetpro hosting plan (http://www.hostmysite.com/hosting/aspnetpro/) as it provides all the required features but my ASP application uses a component (ABC PDF) that create PDF reports on runtime for managers of my company. HMS is not supporting this component.

The monthly traffic of my websites (all five) is not more than 5GB per month.

Please recommend a suitable plan . Please note I require emails, SQL database, web hosting. Web statistics are not necessary. High level features in email software like calendaring, scheduling are not require but global address book will be require. So consider the require RAM.

I am afraid that other customers at VPS with me can crash the server. The downtime will not be a good option.

As the SQL server, Emails, and website all are hosted at same server, there should be a performance issue????

I am a little bit confused as the selection of good hosting plan (and provider) is very important. If I missed to mention anything vital, please forgive me and ask.

Yourmna,

Forget what venkat20 suggested. His post is spam.

I have had some bad experiences with the asp.net pro. Granted I believe this was from the SAN issue HMS experienced, so this may be something of the past. I still have one client on the aspnetpro plan, and since the SAN has been fixed it hasn't gone down once. If you want fast, and stable, get a dedicated box, or colocate your own. If you don't know how to run your own server I would highly recommend a dedicated box with HostMySite. If you have a lot of experience with running your own box, and would never need support with the exception of reboots. Then I would recommend Godaddy's Dedicated.

I setup a Dedicated box with godaddy over 2 weeks ago, and thus far its been running very well. No strange App errors, no crashing. No issues, and its fast. The price came out to about $176 / month, and its loaded up pretty nicely. But once again I don't get any support with it. Godaddy charges an extra $200 / month for the support.

HMS also has their cloud offerings, but I have not yet tried those. I hear lots of great things about them, but to me they are a little pricey.

Before getting my own dedicated box, I had 5 VPS clients, and about 20 shared with HMS. I had already gone through the learning experiences of configuring and running my own via the VPS boxes. If you have never gotten this kind of experience then stick with HMS and get a Managed Dedicated Box. They have some of the best techs one could ask for.

I generally agree with Whitesites - either Dedicated or Cloud if you're worried about uptime, however keep in mind that it's going to be a bit more expensive than shared hosting as you're probably used to.

Just a little follow up. If you want a dedicated box but don't need the support, then buy your own box and colocate. GoDaddy plays god with their SMTP ports. Having a dedicated box is no good if you are not able to build your own SMTP reputation on your IPs. They force you to relay all emails through their relay server, which is constantly getting blacklisted, because many abuse it. Our open rate has dropped since the move, so if you have any kind of bulk email, stay away from godaddy.

One more thing, if your managers are traveling all over the world and are complaining about slow server performance this could have more to do with the ping times related to making requests from and IP far away. Even within the USA I notice a big difference between Texas and the Delaware DataCenter. Most major websites that have international traffic use a CDN ( content distribution Network ), to proxy their website's content, and ensure when people view it the requests goto the closest CDN server. This is why the hosting business is a safe one to get into. As most of the companies cater to USA consumers, and even though I am sure dedicated servers are dirt cheap in china, this would give terrible performance, no matter how many racks you have. So if your company is **** about slow performance when they try to view the site or your applications when they are in china, have them do a ping test to the site. If its anything over 100 ms that is terrible.