When it comes to hosting a website, there are four main options: Shared, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), Dedicated, and Cloud. Each option comes with its own pros and cons. However if you are looking to host an enterprise level website where you need a high level of uptime and performance, your best option is most likely going to be Cloud hosting. At Luminary, we recommend hosting with Microsoft Azure's PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) offering, particularly for websites built on ASP.NET platforms such asKentico,Episerver orSitecore.

The key benefits of Cloud hosting are:

• Control - high level of control over the hosting environment
• Flexibility - high degree of flexibility in terms of changing the memory, RAM and compute power
• Security - provides a high degree of security 
• Scalability - can be easily scaled up – or down – to deal with traffic spikes
• Redundancy - high degree of redundancy to cope in the event of hardware failure.

The only potential drawbacks of Cloud hosting are that it can be expensive to set up, especially compared with Shared hosting, and requires significant technical expertise to implement. However, for most medium-to-large enterprises, these trade-offs are worth the benefits that Cloud hosting has to offer.

Microsoft Azure

Why Microsoft Azure?

Luminary has 20 years of experience with all of the leading Cloud hosting vendors and our preferred partner is Microsoft Azure. The key benefits of Azure versus the other Cloud players are:

• Best of breed Cloud hosting provider – Azure has been named as a ‘Leader’ in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud hosting for a number of years.
• Fast, zero downtime deployments – Azure’s configuration options allow for very easy, zero downtime deployments by switching instances with a press of a button.
• Designed for scale and reliability – Azure App Services and Azure SQL are Cloud-native/Cloud-first PaaS products, a perfect fit for .NET Microsoft SQL applications. Utilising Azure also opens up the use of other Cloud-native products like Azure Serverless Functions for APIs and integrations and in-depth performance management, monitoring, metrics and alerting with Application Insights, plus much more. 
• Backed by a large-scale multinational enterprise – As a Microsoft platform, Azure offers the peace of mind of being backed by a reputable multinational company. 
• Geo-replication opportunities – Disaster Recovery capabilities allow for real-time replication of your application’s SQL database to multiple global regions for a very small fraction of the cost of similar products. Redundant storage practices allow for website data replication to any of the 52 regions worldwide, making sure there are at least three copies of data in each region to provide data protection while ensuring data sovereignty.

Azure hosting with Luminary

Luminary is a Microsoft Cloud Solution Partner and we have used our expertise to develop processes and practices for using Azure. Luminary will set up, configure and tailor the Azure solution to fit your requirements and budget, and will continue to manage and proactively monitor the infrastructure and application.  

Our Hosting and DevOps team bridges the gap between Azure and clients, giving you a trusted point of contact for all website hosting relating support issues. Azure allows for DevOps best practice tooling for continuous zero downtime deployments, environment management tooling using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices (including change management), role based access controls (RBAC), and security best practices.

Why host your ASP.NET site on Azure?

Luminary is one of the world’s most experienced implementers of ASP.NET websites, including Kentico, Episerver and Sitecore. A shared .NET technology framework makes Azure the perfect hosting partner for websites built on these platforms. Azure’s native support for ASP.NET also means we can provide hosting for ASP.NET sites without the overhead of managing a virtual machine (PaaS vs IaaS). This means less overheads (with the handy flow-on effect of less cost to you, the client), faster setup times and faster deployment. 

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services

We also provide hosting services and advice to clients with ASP.NET websites hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Our expertise

Websites we host on Microsoft Azure and key team members

Handy resources

Check out the handy resources below for downloadable guides, checklists and templates to help you achieve your digital goals.