ASP.NET hosting with unlimited single-node scalability

Question

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.

Answer 1

"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.

Answer 2

This can be still accomplished by using a cloud host like www.gearhost.com. Apps live in the cloud and by default get 1 node worker so session stickiness is maintained. You can then scale that application larger workers to accomplish what you need, all while maintaining HA and LB. Even further you can add multiple web workers. Each visitor is tied to a particular node to maintain session state even though you might have 10 workers for example. It's an easy and cheap way to scale a site with 100 visitors to many million in just a few clicks.