Question

Photo of Brandon Gamache

2

Web Hosting

6

Hi.

In the "Planning for Rock" documentation, Spark and Rock are said to be hosted on the Windows Azure platform. Right now I am just looking around to see what the best pricing is for web hosting (we are also considering on-site hosting but just wanting to look at all of our options). Which tier are you using (free, shared, standard)? And how much are you currently paying for Azure Webhosting? It looks like they have rates for every little detail, so I'm not certain what their overall pricing would be.

Currently we are using F1 and have around 70k records (over a period of 10 years). F1 database size is roughly 450MB. Providing this since it may also play a part in cost.

Thanks!

Brandon Gamache

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Thank you for the replies. I decided to try out their free trial. Do you know how to get the internal and public addresses to work in Azure? The Azure site is crossroads.azurewebsites.net (may be temp down because of some changes I made) but during the install I put admin.crossroads.azurewebsite.net and public as crossroads.azurewebsites.net. The admin extension doesn't work so I'm not certain what I need to set up. For the time being I can access the database and make it so that admin is crossroads.azurewebsites.net. I'll try and mess with DNS settings tomorrow.

Thanks!

Hosting
  • David Turner

    David Turner

    Brandon, you may want to enter the question about getting internal and public address to work as a new question since people don't get notified when you just edit a question.

    • Photo of Jon Edmiston

      3

      While we're still learning a bit about hosting as we add experience in the beta our latest thinking on hosting is below (we'll be updating our manuals soon to reflect this).

      For Small / Medium Size Churches

      We'd recommend Arvixe. Their pricing and options are the best fit for Rock that we've found. We especially like that you can have as many databases of any size you want and their service to date has been very good. We'd recommend getting at least a Business class package. If you're thinking about on-line giving though their VPS package adds functionality that may be helpful in passing your PCI audit.  We'll know more about that soon. (Note... we have no ties at all with Arvixe and are not receiving any affiliate or re-seller commissions at all. As a policy we will never make deals with vendors where we get a cut at your expense.  Just had to mention that.)

      For Large Churches

      We would recommend self-hosting or hosting with Azure. We've had good success with Azure. As Mason mentioned we are running on a Shared / Small instance. We could probably do with less, but some of the advanced features we wanted are only available on that plan. There are a ton of really cool features you get with Azure that you don't with smaller hosts. Things like sync'ed web server/ db server backups, Git deploys, etc. These aren't really necessary, but are nice. Our average bill to date is around $85 per month for the website & database (we have other sites, VMs and cloud storage to support our efforts which cost more...) One thing we do need to mention about Azure is the reliability. We have had a couple of outages with them (one on the beta release date in fact). These issues have been fixed relatively quickly but they can be frustrating. Microsoft is moving at a rapid pace to add very innovative features. I think we have to expect there will be an occasional hiccup as they roll these features out. I would recommend spending an extra $35/month for the developer level support. Their support is excellent (probably the best I've experienced in webhosting) and with the issues they've been having it's good to have. I know this sounds odd to have to pay more for their issues, but if you want to be on the cutting edge you have to be ok with a little spilled blood.

      One point I’d add is on the topic of database storage. I would plan for quite a bit more database storage. Looking at your current usage I would guess you don’t have many attendee photos. That will probably change with Rock, especially as we add some of our attendee self-service features.  You’ll have a lot of photos and it’ll change the way you look at member data. You also have the ability to attach documents to member records. These blobs can add quite a bit of storage.

      Hope this helps!

    • Photo of Mason Kinyon

      0

      The Spark and Rock sites (which run on the same Rock RMS instance) are using the standard tier with an instance size of "Small (1 core, 1.75GB Memory)". As for pricing, I'm not sure since I don't have access to that information.

    • Photo of Chris Funk

      0

      There will also be a cloud hosting field guide coming out in the near future to help guide you through setting up Rock in a cloud environment.  It will be announced on the RockRMS facebook page, on the @TheRockRMS twitter feed and will be available at   https://www.rockrms.com/Rock/Learn when released.  Also Microsoft provides a pricing calculator at http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/ if you would like to get an estimate of how much a particular instance size would cost.

    • Photo of Jackie Cox

      0

      Jon -

       

      Can you define what you would consider small, medium, and large church? We're trying to decide which category our church falls into to make a decision on which type of hosting to choose from.

      Thanks so much!

       

    • Photo of Nathan La Barbera

      0

      I would recommend checking out Managed Ministries! Not only do we host Rock using Azure's Cloud solutions, but we also will perform a same-day install to get you up and running quickly. Spark Development also mentioned in this blog article that we have joined a hosting partnership with them. Let me know if you have any other questions. 

      https://managedministries.com/RockHosting

    • Photo of Jay Greentree

      0

      I'm currently hosting Rock on http://dailyrazor.com/ with no issues for my own project outside of my church. I'll try to write a review once I get things finished.