WSS 3.0 Hosting Providers

I have been researching WSS 3.0 web hosting providers, so I thought I'd share my list with you. This is not an extensive list of providers, but I'm hoping to add to it as I find out about others. I'm only showing the basic plan for each provider, to give some level of comparison. Figures valid as of April 22, 2007-04-22

Website	Plan name	Yearly fee	Storage	Users	Notes
http://www.frontpages-web-hosting.net	SharePoint Basic	$212 USD	1 GB	Unlimited	30 day free trial
http://www.webcentral.com.au	Managed SharePoint	$860 AUD	0.5 GB	25
http://www.724hosting.com	SharePoint Hosting	$239.40 USD	0.5 GB	25	15 day free trial
http://www.webhost4life.com	Basic	$139.35 USD	0.5 GB	50	Select the Advance ASP.net hosting option ($9.95 pm), then add the SharePoint Basic component ($19.94 py)
http://www.sharepointsite.com	Bronze	$383.52 USD	0.15 GB	50
http://www.alentus.com	SharePoint Professional Plan	$371.40 USD	0.2 GB	40
http://www.sharepointhosting.com	Bronze Hosting	$299.50 USD	1 GB	Unlimited	Daily backups
http://services.mail2web.com	SharePoint	179.40 GBP	0.5 GB	Unlimited
http://www.ultimahosts.net	SharePoint.net 3.0	$300 USD	5 GB	Unlimited	Nightly backups
http://www.phase2int.com	SharePoint Standard - Basic	$300 USD	1 GB	40	Nightly backups, 30 day free trial

Bob Fox - Screencaster

Check out the following screen casts from Bob Fox that visually demonstrate some useful concepts

How to Screencast:  Setting up your Virtual Lab Part 1 – Setting up Active Directory, POP3, SQL and IIS

How To Screencast: Alternate Access Mappings or AAM – An introduction to setting up alternate access mapping

April SharePoint User Group

Anyone in Sydney on Tuesday April 17^th should try to come along to the Sydney SharePoint User Group meeting. We got two great speakers lined up. Noel Williams from MacroView is going to demonstrate tools that help you manage your e-mails directly in SharePoint 2007.

Then we have Stephen Cummins of www.SPSFAQ.com coming along to tell his tales from the trenches. This guy has been involved in more than 30 SharePoint deployments for companies such as HP, Kraft and the Disney Corporation. That's a wealth of experience that you don't get to meet every day.

So hop over to here to register for the event. It's on at the Unique World offices in Campbell Street (map). For more information about the user group and to subscribe to e-mail notifications on upcoming events check out http://sps.uniqueworld.net/Sydney

Ivan

Slow file uploads

I was working with a client recently that was experiencing poor performance on their SharePoint environment. They were about to go live, but the performance testing was coming back with terrible results, even with only a small number of users. Initially we weren't sure where the problem was, but we were able to quickly isolate the issue down to network performance.

We noticed that certain users were able to upload quickly, but for other users the file upload process crawled. We ran up Performance Monitor on our front end SharePoint server to see what was happening. Adding the Total Bytes/sec monitor in the Network category gave us some useful information. For the users experiencing the good performance, our monitor would spike and then drop back to zero (the blue line below). For those experiencing bad performance the network utilisation would stay low. Something was throttling the network bandwidth for these users

To cut a long story short, the client finally discovered that the issue was to do with a default setting in Internet Explorer 6.0 and earlier. This limits the data rate that the browser sends information. This becomes particularly noticeable with larger files (e.g. greater than 2 MB).

To resolve the issue you need to make an update to the registry on the user's computer. You can read more about this here

Ishai Sagi is MVPed

I just heard from Ishai that he has been awarded an MVP in SharePoint. Well deserved too – this guy puts so much effort into his blogs, forum posts and community presentations. Congratulations buddy!

Publishing from Word 2007

Finally! I now can publish to Blogger directly from Word 2007. I could never get this working before, but I have just rebuilt my laptop and I was able to register my account without any hassles.