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 has turned out to be (€150 p/m on average!) now that I have started paying for it. That is just way too much money for a site that is not going to generate money any time soon so I’ve decided to move to a regular hosting provider (DiscountASP.Net).
One of the things I’ll truly miss though, is the separated Staging and Production environments Azure provides, along with the zero-downtime environment swap.
My question is, how could I go about “simulating” a staging environment while hosting on a traditional provider? And what is my best shot at minimizing downtime on new deployments?
Thanks.
UPDATE: I chose the answer I chose not because I consider it the best method, but because it is what makes the most sense for me at this point.
I use DiscountASP myself. It’s pretty basic hosting for sure, a little behind the times. But I have found just creating a subdirectory and publishing my beta/test/whatever versions there works pretty well. It’s not fancy or pretty, but does get the job done.
In order to do this you need to create the subdirectory first, then go into the control panel and tell DASP that directory is an application. Then you also have to consider that directory’s web.config is going to be a combination of its own and the parent one. You also have to consider robots.txt for this subdirectory and protecting it in general from nosy people.
You could probably pull this off with subdomains too, depending on how your domain is set up.
Another option: appharbor? They have a free plan. If you can stay within the confines of their free plan, it might work well (I’ve never used them, currently interested in trying them though)