My company simply started thanks to websites I made for people I know. The more people with companies you know the more problems they will ask help for (especially if your working in the IT..). One of the easy questions is: "Can you create a website for me?". Yes of course, it's really easy!
- Search the internet for a Wordpress template
- Install the template in Wordpress
- Add some caching tools
- Host it somewhere cheap
1 month later
- Slow as hell
- Downtime issues (cheap hosting)
- Random errors due to customer mistakes on the back-end
- Login attacks (disabling wp-admin is not a real solution for the end user..)
- Forget to update Wordpress, website hacked
I had to figure out how I could get rid of Wordpress and I decided I wanted to go back to my old trusted platform (ASP.NET). With that decision I made a couple of bullets I had to figure out:
- Finding a good hosting company for .NET websites
- Finding a reliable framework to build the websites quickly and reliable
The first bullet was not so easy, good .NET Website hosting companies are pretty unique and expensive. The only solution was to get a VPS (Virtual Private Server). Finding cheap and good hosting for .NET websites is barely impossible. The only solution was to host them by myself. A well known company in the Netherlands is TransIP. I decided to buy two VPS servers. One for the website, one for the database (security reasons). In total way more expensive then the Wordpress hosting but thanks to my own VPS I'm able to host multiple websites on a single platform.
The second bullet is also a challenge. I was looking for the next framework:
- Open source
- Free to use
- Easy in use for my customers
- Easy to develop a website
The bigger .NET frameworks like Kentico and Episerver are expensive for small companies so I tried out multiple frameworks which were free and open-source. In the end I have chosen for PiranhaCMS. PiranhaCMS is a lightweight framework for developing ASP.NET MVC websites (https://piranhacms.org/). The biggest benefit is that it's possible to use HTML for the front-end and C# for the back-end, precisely what I was looking for! One of the biggest benefits of .NET websites is that they are running in cache, they load really quick and there are almost no issues when a lot of customers are using the website.
I have also a test environment running which I can see how much the website will use in RAM:
As visible I can easy run 10+ websites on 4GB of ram per setup (web server and database server are separate).
The PiranhaCMS framework works really straight forward like:
- Front-end
- Back-end
The only thing to keep in mind when you are working with .NET websites is that they need some time to build. If you don't touch them for a while and a new visitor tries to open the website it needs some time. You can bypass this problem with fine-tuning your IIS server. I did fine-tune the IIS server but besides that I also created a 'website warmer':
By simply creating a task:
It will call the website every 10mins and I'm sure it will always load fast! :)
I'll ask my customers to choose a nice template from https://www.templatemonster.com/, once they found and bought the template I'll need most of the time a weekend max to put everything in PiranhaCMS and another customer is happy.
Any questions? You can always contact me! :)