SQL Server Web edition or Shared?

[draneb]

Hello,

I just signed up with a new hosting company today. (the search continues)

I am going to run AbleCommerce on a VPS with 4gb ram and 80gb disk space.

When I inquired about adding some SQL databases to my account they recommended running SQL Server Web edition on the VPS over a shared SQL environment. Is that the best way to go?

Thank you!

[mikek]

Hello,

It depends on how the VPS configuration has been set up. From our experience MSSQL does not perform well on network attached disk space or slow SATA disks. If the 80GB disk space
is located on such environment your site may run slow even with 4GB RAM. I would also recommend stay away from VPS platforms based on "parallels virtuozzo containers". Virtuozzo containers
are running Windows on top of Linux OS kernel and work only for static sites or file storage servers.

We use Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V with fast 15K SCSI drives in RAID10 arrays for our clients and are able to provide site response time under 500ms for AC 7.x sites.

[compunerdy]

I have a small DB (right now its at 100mb) and I probably don't get more than 40 users at a time or so.
I also run my forums on the server which has roughly 30+ users at a time.

I am currently doing this on a VPS (yes virtuozzo) with 1.7GB of ram and running my store DB with SQL 2008 express on the same server.

So far its all very fast and running fine.

[mikek]

The main advantage of virtuozzo (from hosting perspective) is that you only have one copy of the OS installed, and then you define "containers"; each container is
a partitioned set of links to the underlying OS APIs and drivers, which lets a number of separate virtual "containers" use a single underlying OS. This approach is very
cost effective because the hosting company only pays for one Windows OS license per server and all VM's are running under the same Windows license thus, the hosting
provider is able to provide low cost VM solution. The issue with virtuozzo containers is that there is no hardware separation between the different VM's and all VM's are
competing for the same server resources, site running on another VM can affect your site performance if it starts receiving high traffic or needs more memory. Depending
upon the provider, memory can be oversold and performance is then no better than shared hosting setups.

Paravirtualization platforms like VMware, XEN and Microsoft Hyper-V provide clear VM separation and each VM is more like dedicated server than virtual machine, with its own
kernel, memory and swap space.

If your hosting provider does not oversell resources and all other VMs are running low traffic sites your site should be fine. My response to the previous post was based on the fact that
draneb is running site on 4GB VM which assumes medium to high traffic site.

Running an independent site monitoring service (we use PingDom for our clients) is also a good practice for an ecommerce site. With site monitoring you can monitor site
response time for your site from different locations around the world and see if your provider is overselling or running high traffic VM's on the same server.

[michael.p.larsen]

Your forum db and AbleCommerce db AND web server are all hosted on the same machine? I think that might be a PCI compliance issue...

[compunerdy]

Even if I do not store credit card numbers?

[jmestep]

What's really weird is that SQL Server resources say that integrated security is more secure than username and password, but try to get from one server to another using integrated security.

[edinos]

Hello,

I just signed up with a new hosting company today. (the search continues)

I am going to run AbleCommerce on a VPS with 4gb ram and 80gb disk space.

When I inquired about adding some SQL databases to my account they recommended running SQL Server Web edition on the VPS over a shared SQL environment. Is that the best way to go?

Thank you!

I am from Texas as well. Been through the same search process. Did you find a webhosting company?

[draneb]

Hello,

I have one AC site running on a shared hosting account at discountasp.net. The site is always up but it is slow, slow. My last VPS was with ultimahosts and it went down very frequently and when it did it went down for days at a time... 2, 3 and even 4 days out of the week.

My other AC site that I focus on the most is running on a VPS machine. Once I switched to VPS I have had nothing but difficult times. I just switched to softsyshosting yesterday so we'll see how it goes. I couldn't find any bad reviews on them. When I put in a support ticket I get a response within a couple of minutes. There is no phone number though, as with most of them... I was trying to stay within a certin budget $100-$125 a month. For that you get a windows 2008 hyper-v vps with 2 cpu cores, 4gb ram, 80gb disk space and MS SQL 2008 Web Edition installed on the VPS.

It seems to be super fast. Right now I am dealing the AC move. I did a backup of the database and restored it to the new server but still lost almost all settings like payment methods, shipping methods, etc. They are still showing up in admin but if you go to checkout there are no shipping methods or payment methods available. I am having to delete all of those settings and enter them again. Now it looks like customers can checkout again. So, this isn't something I want to do very often.

If softsyshosting does not work out I am going to go with Web2Market or Drundo.

[compunerdy]

Your forum db and AbleCommerce db AND web server are all hosted on the same machine? I think that might be a PCI compliance issue...

I could not find any info stating that I could not have the DB on the same machine. I did get PCI compliance passed from McAfee also which is free for a year if you use paypal.

[mikek]

Hi Tim,

Yes, you can have both Web and DB server on the same OS environment and it will pass the PCI compliance tests if the MSSQL TCP/IP interface is being disabled. With tcp/ip mssql interface disabled
the mssql server will be available trough shared memory interface only and will not be visible from any of the network interfaces. The shared memory interface is also much faster than tcp/ip since
it does not go trough the heavy tcp/ip data packets box/unbox mechanism. All interfaces are configurable from: SQL Server Configuration Manager -> SQL Server Network Configuration -> Protocols for MSSQL

[compunerdy]

Yup.. I have been very happy with the speed since going this route. As I stated I am just using SQL express as well. Not sure at what point it would be beneficial to switch to non express but for now this works for me.

[Shopping Cart Admin]

Howdy,

Not sure at what point it would be beneficial to switch to non express but for now this works for me.

SQL Server express only runs on a single processor and is 'limited' to 3gb of space.

Yes, you can have both Web and DB server on the same OS environment and it will pass the PCI compliance tests if the MSSQL TCP/IP interface is being disabled.

Might pass the tests but from my understanding it's not what the PCI rules are looking for. The SQL server is suppose to be outside of the DMZ, protected by a firewall.

[jmestep]

draneb-
The problem with your payment gateway and/or shipping carrier could be based on the encryption changing after the move. If you don't keep the same encryption, then you have to set up the gateways again because some of that data is stored in the database encrypted. You can set up the new gateways, move the methods to use those gateways, then delete the old gateways. If this is the problem, then your charge card info in the order payment screen in the admin is gibberish also.