Can anyone recommend a windows VPS?

I don't think I'm supposed to recommend Linode's "competitors" on these forums, but what about

http://www.mono-project.com/

@hybinet:

I don't think I'm supposed to recommend Linode's "competitors" on these forums, but what about

http://www.mono-project.com/

Have you had any success with getting Mono running on your linode? I was messing with it just the other day, and although it worked fine, the mono fastcgi server would use 100% CPU while just sitting there with no requests.

Sorry, I hope this request isn't stepping on the toes of linode. Please, linode, offer a windows VPS package and I will be the first to sign up! I'll be keeping my existing linux-node of course, Winode anyone?

Yeah, I've played with mono on a linux box that I have at home.

For nothing but basic .NET it does seem to work, though it isn't nearly as efficient as real .NET. It is also missing a lot of latest and/or more advanced stuff that the official release has.

The absolute decider is simply that all of my latest work is using MVC, which mono doesn't have yet. I've been a .NET programmer for years and absolutely hate web forms :evil:. Up until MVC I refused to use .NET for any personal projects. With the advent of MVC, .NET web development has become something that actually makes sense. That is, if you can make hosting cost effective.

@Xeoz:

Winode anyone?
Convince Microsoft to build a paravirtualized kernel, and boot with pv-grub. :D

Haha, well they have "Hyper-V" now, so they are finally moving in that direction. The real problem is their licensing scheme. So far as I can tell, they don't want virtualization to be cost effective, yet.

Hopefully services like yours eventually push them to offer a licensing system that can actually work and be profitable for would-be hosts.

I'm sure you've already thought of this, but your situation is example number eleventy-billion for why to not tie your output to a proprietary platform.

Java FTW?

Take that Mike!

Short reply so as to not post flame-bait: :P

There are many good reasons to develop in .NET, it is an excellent framework and C# is an excellent language. And so is PHP, I love php and am quite experienced with it, but there are times when .NET seems the better choice.

And for some reason I don't really care for java as a web development framework, just personal preference.

PHP ninjas, ATTACK!

@jed:

@Xeoz:

Winode anyone?
Convince Microsoft to build a paravirtualized kernel, and boot with pv-grub. :D

Well, Windows does work under Xen, so…

@Guspaz:

@jed:

@Xeoz:

Winode anyone?
Convince Microsoft to build a paravirtualized kernel, and boot with pv-grub. :D

Well, Windows does work under Xen, so…
With a paravirtualized kernel or Xen having access to VT-X. Since Linode hosts use VT-X, paravirtualized is the only option left.

@Xeoz:

There are many good reasons to develop in .NET, it is an excellent framework and C# is an excellent language.

I am a senior software architect at my day job, and I must agree. It's not that .NET sucks, Mono or not - the Visual Studio development environment is superb and C# does the job for sure - it is all the Windoze garbage ** attached to .NET ** that gives me the professional equivalent of diarrhea every day at work.

I love Python + Linux. The development environment I use is not nearly as polished as Visual Studio, but Python is absolutely outstanding for scientific, engineering and R&D type high performance computing work - and Linux is far, far nicer than Windoze especially on multicore CPU systems like Linode has.

James

You guys need to give Flex a try. It blows away any front-end development tools you've used.

Flex front-end and web service back-end (Java, PHP, whatever) are natural.

Liquidweb is very good. They do offer Windows based VPS for a premium. In my mind that is like charging extra for an inferior product.

On their Linux offerings they use Parrallels rather than Xen. I have had bad experiences with Parrallels. It does not support swap memory. When a customer does something memory intensive like a full root backup, it can crash your node due to lack of memory. When I asked about swap, they said to order the next larger node for an additional $50 per month to solve the memory problem.

As good as Liquidweb is, Linode is far superior.

You could try softlayer.

A customer of mine used them for a vps. They are pretty nice though we did have some trouble with their SAN at least once, but they are a pretty legit company, I'm sure they've gotten it sorted by now.

Thanks for the recommendations! I'll check these services out.