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Since this question is from a user's (developer's) perspective I figured it might fit better here than on Server Fault.

I'd like an ASP.NET hosting that meets the following criteria:

  • The application seemingly runs on a single server (so no need to worry about e.g. session state or even static variables)
  • There is an option to scale storage, memory, DB size and CPU-power up and down on demand, in an "unlimited" way

I researched but there seems not to be such a platform, that completely abstracts the underlying architecture away and thus has the ease of use of a simple shared hosting but "unlimited" scalability.

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For scaling (resources) could you not use a cloud hosted MVC3 app? –  user1477388 Sep 7 '12 at 17:01
Yes, but it has the problems of a multi-node architecture when scaled horizontally. But apparently what I've asked for is not yet possible :-). –  Piedone Sep 12 '12 at 19:28
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1 Answer

up vote 1 down vote accepted

"Single server" and "scalability" are mutually exclusive, I'm afraid. But a good load-balancer will apply affinity to requests so you don't need to needlessly double-cache data on multiple servers.

However, well-designed web applications are easy to port to a multiple-server scenario.

I think your best option is something like Windows Azure Websites (separate from Azure Web Workers) which run on a VM you don't have access to. The VM itself provides enough power as-is necessary to run your website, so you don't need to worry about allocating extra CPU power or RAM.

Things like SQL Server are handled separately, but is very cheap to run, and you can drag a slider to give yourself more storage space.

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Thank you! Actually AWS is probably the closest to what I've asked. It's a multi-node architecture still (when one uses multiple instances) so one has to keep this in mind. –  Piedone Sep 12 '12 at 19:28
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