How to select a Kentico Host in Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne

As one of the largest partners in Australia and the Pacific (APAC) region we commonly get asked about Kentico Hosing in Brisbane, Kentico Hosting in Sydney and Kentico Hosting in Melbourne opposed to Kentico Hosting in the USA or UK and even Singapore.

Here are our top 7 tips on the subject of Kentico Hosting;

1. Host locally - Make sure your server is not only in Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne but make sure it is as close to your customers as possible. It really does not matter if your customer is in Brisbane and the hosting company is in Melbourne as we really do have a fast backbone, but as soon as you go offshore your customers will see a difference.

2. Avoid Azure - Look, don’t get me wrong I think Azure is great, but we are just not ready yet. I have heard disaster stories where FTP was missing for a few days and the sites dropped out. The concept is great, location is Singapore and we still have some teething problems. Just consider this.

3. Support, Redundancy, Backups & Know How – Use a host that knows how to host Kentico products. If they ask “What is Kentico” then put down the phone. It’s not the complexity of Kentico that is the problem but instead the “Know How” to fix something if an issue arises or the guarantee that if a disaster happens backups have been made. Use a company who has history, is not the cheapest on the block and can support you 24/7.

4. Shared or Dedicated – Of course Kentico Hosting companies will want to sell you a dedicated solution. Hey, they cost 10 times more per month than shared options. What you need to do is decide is this overkill? Typically a “Shared Kentico Hosting Platform” is a very powerful machine that allows multiple tenants to not only share the resources, but also share the costs. If the servers were slow then users would not host on them.

5. Has to be Dedicated but what configuration do I need? – You can run Kentico with one server. You will need to install the IIS Web Server and SQL Server on the same machine. You can even run Kentico on the free SQL express version but please be aware of the database limit sizes of these free products (sizes differ on versions so do your research - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlexpress/archive/2010/04/21/database-size-limit-increased-to-10gb-in-sql-server-2008-r2-express.aspx).

Understanding that Kentico can be hosted on a single server we would only suggest this for a small set of sites or a single medium site. We recommend that you have a separate IIS Web Server and Database Server as the load is spread across the two servers and a large performance gain is made.

Below is a chart of a typical server installation. We recommend that you contact one of our engineers to find out what type of server is best for your website. Typically a Shared Solution is fine for small to medium websites.

6. Full Trust or Medium Trust & GZip - The medium trust level is often used by web hosts on shared servers to prevent applications from accessing certain resources that could be harmful to other websites running on the server. Kentico CMS can be used with the default medium trust policy. If you were to run Kentico at Full Trust then you will have access to many features not available on Medium Trust. What it means is if you want to take full control of Kentico then go full trust.

GZip compression also speeds up your websites by compressing content coming down the wire. When this feature is enabled your website will be a lot faster to download but at the expense of the web servers CPU. Many shared hosts do not allow GZip due to this CPU usage as it may affect other tenants on the server. Our hosting packages have full trust options with Gzip.

7. Kentico Installation Manager - Kentico Installation Manager (also referred to as KIM) is an external utility which enables installation and management of Kentico CMS instances, upgrades and security patches. Administrators can manage all instances installed on a single machine using this tool, which is especially useful on machines with a large number of instances. Ensure your web host has KIM enabled and installed as you do not want your site to be down for many hours as files are uploaded to the server. A straight forward KIM upgrade takes minutes when installed on the Web Server.

Summary

So there you have it – top 7 tips for selecting a Kentico Host in Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne.

Of course we wrote this article not only to help you make the selection but to also allow us the opportunity to provide you with a free proposal to not only configure your new Kentico Hosting account, but to also manage the site move for you as well.

We'll help you figure out which is the hosting type and level for your website if you give us a call on 1300 308 210 or make contact we are here to help.

About Web Design Magic

Typically we work with small, medium and large sized organisations that are looking to use the Internet to make some form of business gain. By using the Kentico CMS and Kentico Enterprise Marketing Suite platforms, we are able to build commercial grade (no open source) websites, online stores, Intranets and systems. We have helped small businesses and larger organisations like Nutrimetics Australia, Virgin Group, Suncorp Stadium, Brisbane Entertainment Centre as well as State, Federal and International governments.

We are APAC’s largest Kentico Partners offering Kentico Website development, Kentico Training and Kentico Hosting.

You can find more of our clients here - http://www.webdesignmagic.com.au/Our-Clients.aspx