Set up your development and production environment and minimize downtime on simple hosting

Question

I have an ASP.NET MVC 3 application, WouldBeBetter.com , currently hosted on Windows Azure. I have an introductory special subscription package that was free for several months but was surprised at how expensive it turned out (on average 150 euros per month!) When I started paying for it. This is just too much money for a site that is not going to generate money in the near future, so I decided to switch to a regular hosting provider (DiscountASP.Net).

One of the things that I really miss is the separate Staging and Production environments that Azure provides along with replacing a zero-downtime environment.

My question is: how can I "simulate" an intermediate environment when hosting on a traditional provider? And what is my best chance to reduce downtime for new deployments?

Thanks.

UPDATE: I chose the answer that I did not choose because I consider it the best method, but because that is what makes sense to me at this point.

Answer 1

I myself use DiscountASP. This is a fairly simple hosting, of course, a bit behind. But I just found creating a subdirectory and posting beta tests / any versions that work there very well. It is not fancy or beautiful, but it does its job.

To do this, you first need to create a subdirectory, then go to the control panel and tell DASP that the directory is an application. Then you should also consider that the web.config directory will be a combination of its own and its parent. You should also consider the robots.txt file for this subdirectory and protect it generally from prying people.

Perhaps you can also remove this with subdomains, depending on how your domain is configured.

Another option: appharbor? They have a free plan. If you can stay within your free plan, it might work (I never used them, they are currently interested in trying them)

Answer 2

Before abandoning Windows Azure, there are a few economical things you can do to lower your monthly bill. For instance:

• If you have both a web role and a worker role, combine them. Take background processing, queue processing, etc. And run them in your web role (do your multitasking run in OnStart (), and then just add a Run () override to handle the call queue, etc.
• Consider the new Extra Small instance, which costs a little less than half the Small instance
• Remove your intermediate deployment after you are certain that your production code is working properly. Store the cspkg CD, although in the blob repository so that it can be redeployed.

Answer 3

1) Get an automatic deployment tool. There are many free / open-source resources that millions / billion companies actually use for their production environment.

2) Get the second hosting package identical to the first. Use it as your production, and then simply relocate to production as you walk through the aisles.