DotNetNuke Hosting
DotNetNuke hosting seems to be extremely easy to find and extremely difficult to find at the same time. DotNetNuke has a large variety of hosting companies that are dedicated almost entirely to the DotNetNuke community.
With so many options, it is surprising to see so many DotNetNuke hosting providers not giving webmasters what they need for a well-run DotNetNuke website.
Let’s take a quick look at exactly what you need for a quality DNN website.
1. What Must DotNetNuke Hosting Have – The Specs
The first thing that needs to be pointed out is that DotNetNuke is more heavily reliant on RAM (RAM is used for internal DNN performance caching) than many other CMS alternatives.
Every hosting provider tries to flaunt bandwidth and storage, but neglect to talk about RAM.
A benefit of using a quality DotNetNuke hosting provider is they know exactly what you need. In fact, some hosting services will tweak the application pool to set DotNetNuke to cache to memory rather than to a disk.
Since DNN can quickly become resource heavy, it is important to plan out your websites future in order to determine the right DotNetNuke hosting options that are right for you.
Keep in mind that many shared hosting plans do not scale well, which means your site could go down if your website suddenly becomes popular and traffic surges become common.
DotNetNuke 5.0+ are based upon ASP.NET 3.5 support and will access at least 1 SQL server database. Remember, these are minimum requirements, so plan accordingly.
2. Full Trust Mode and a Dedicate Application Pool
It is important to find a DNN host that provides dedication application pools and supports full trust mode.
A dedicated application pool will ensure that your website is isolated from the other websites on the server and prevents other websites from affecting your website.
Without full trust mode, some DNN modules may not work, especially news feed type modules that require communication with other websites.
3. The Community
The DotNetNuke community is a close one and very helpful if you are willing to listen.
When researching specific DotNetNuke hosting providers, there will be a large amount of honest feedback about almost all of them.
For example, GoDaddy often creates problems for DNN users because they do not allow for DNN to be uploaded to the root folder. On the other hand, PowerDNN seems to get glowing comments everywhere you turn.
