Part 3 - Part  2 - Part 1

Welcome to the fourth post in our short ASP.NET hosting review series. Our goal was to hand pick the best hosting providers for every budget that are 100% compatible with MonoX. Motivated by our user's feedback, we purchased standard hosting plans with more than 20 popular providers and tried to install MonoX on their servers. We decided to recommend only the best of them in these posts - the compilation of funny and frustrating experiences with well known, but not so professional hosting companies will be published in one of the following articles.

Last time we moved on from the classic shared hosting scenarios to more advanced Virtual Private Server (VPS) technology. SoftSys offers an excellent value for the price an we were very happy with the features they provide. However, we did not stop there: we wanted to see if you could get an even better service. And guess what - you can, but for a higher price.
As always, there's no such thing as a free lunch, but if you need a slightly better performance, API that allows you to programatically adjust available resources, Visual Studio plug-in that allows you to manage your servers interactivelly from your favorite IDE, and a "fanatical support" that deserves its name, you should turn to Rackspace's CloudServers. While most hosting companies focus on the technology end of hosting, Rackspace focuses on service and support. This approach can be felt all around, and we were really happy with our experience with them. However, their price is nearly double as high as that of SoftSys: almost $60 to give you approximatelly same server resources, with bandwidth charged separately (SoftSys includes initial 300 Gb in the price even in the smallest plan). Our load test results (to be published later) indicate that Rackpace does provide premium performance, but it is up to you to decide if this is worth the price difference.
Additionally, Rackspace offers another really interesting service for those of you that cannot afford dedicated servers, and/or need to scale quickly when traffic spikes occur. It is called CloudSites, and presents a fully managed platform that can offer full scalability for a relatively low price ($149). To get a new site going, you just FTP your code up to the cloud and it runs across a large pool of load-balanced servers automatically. In any case, it can be an interesting alternative to dedicated hosting for various scenarios.