Blog - Important Hosting Update

The beta process has taught us a lot about running Rock on diverse hosting environments. It’s too much good information to keep to ourselves, so we want to share what we’ve learned over the last five months with you.

We gleaned much of our experience by working on Rock’s installer and update process. During these two critical times Rock really stretches the capabilities and capacity of shared hosting environments. Through testing, we found that the server’s AppPool settings are critical for successful installs and updates.

We can't forget that for all its simplicity, Rock is a sophisticated application using the latest technology. That sophistication needs substantial resources to crank through the large amounts of data necessary to drive its relationship management capabilities.

Through our experience we found that while Rock works well on most Windows web hosts, Arvixe’s AppPool settings cause mysterious errors post-install and update. These errors go away after several minutes, but they do not represent the quality environment we want for our community. After working with Arvixe for over a month, we’re still no closer to solving these issues. And this is despite numerous hours on each of our parts to work together on finding a solution. So, until we can reach a resolution, we are putting our recommendation of their services on hold.

Based on our new beta-testing knowledge, we've updated our Rock Solid External Hosting guide with updated recommendations. You’ll find these recommendations are more specific in terms of scaling Rock to different sizes of organizations.

We know some of you may have signed up with Arvixe during the beta period. Here's a couple of thoughts for you.

• We are continuing to work with Arvixe to find a solution to this problem. There still are a good number of things to like about the Arvixe environment and we want to make it work. In our latest communication with them this week it seems like they are close to solving the issue. We'll keep you posted.
• If you have signed up with Arvixe let us know. This will allow us to communicate with them the impact Rock is having on their custom base. It will also allow us to help them prioritize the servers that need the fix. Please email jon(at)sparkdevnetwork.org with your server name.
• Keep in mind the issues we have seen only occur during the install and update process. These issues display themselves as 'compile exceptions' that go away after a few minutes. These issues are not unique to Rock; their forums have posts with other customers having the same issues with their applications.
• If you’re not too far along, you might consider changing to a different host.

We apologize we did not get this right from the start of the beta period. We’ve worked hard to address these issues with Arvixe and to seek a resolution. We will continue to collaborate with them on this situation.