Orchard Hosted on WinHost

With so many ASP.NET Host Provider available competition has gotten really fierce. Prices as low as $5/mo - but the caveat stands with the statement: You get what you pay for.

I normally will point my customers to web hosting providers like DiscountASP but with a yearly price tag of nearly $200/yr it can get pretty pricey. Performance is great, response is at its best and the service is impeccable. However, it always comes back to price...

So I ventured out and did what any other frugal person would do and search for other providers. I did find WinHost and I hosted one of my domains on their servers. Everything seems pretty smooth until I began poking around the Orchard's Control Panel.

The symptom was that Orchard's Control Panel would log me off after a few clicks or if I waited more than 30 seconds before posting a change. After a few email with Winhost's Tech Support it turns out that Orchard uses more than 100MB of memory. One of WinHost's limitation is 100MB per app pool - it recycles it once it reaches that threshold... Along with other thresholds as well.

I ran into this discussion: http://orchard.codeplex.com/discussions/254458

which led to this article: http://orchardproject.net/docs/Setting-up-a-machine-key.ashx

Once I applied the fix everything was working just as expected. Keep in mind that the app pool will still recycle but at least it won't log you out of the system. This is great if all you have is simple or static content - in my case that's exactly what I have. So an occasional app recycle won't really hurt anything I'm hosting.

If you're hosting something more mission critical you may think about paying the higher price because sometimes getting what you pay isn't getting what you're paying for... :-)