Army of volunteer webservice data providers

[BobAchgill]

What is needed to set up a home ASP.NET webservice that
my VB .NET Win Form application interact with?

I want to set up an architecture that will utilize
volunteers hosting shadow webservices of my program's
data webservice to spread out the load for the many
clients. I will do I like the game server programs and
determine which volunteer webservice site is
fastest/least busy and have the client get data updates
from that volunteer shadow service site.

What products does each volunteer need to add to his
XPPro computer?

Are adding these products difficult or can I hope to get
even grandmothers with spare cable bandwidth to be
volunteer shadow webservice sites?

Does it have to be a ASP.NET solution for me to use
Visual Studio to write the webservice end VB .NET
methods?

What would be a good low cost approach to setting up this
army of shadow service sites?

This is a free ware educational system. So I can not
afford to be paying for bandwidth to support a large
client set.

Thanks!

Bob

 

[Ken Dopierala Jr.]

Hi Bob,

They will need to install IIS, the .Net Framework and your web service in
that order. However if they are using XPPro they are going to be limited to
the number of users that can hit them at a time. When this error happens
your call will error out so in your software you will need to capture this
and try it again. I would recommend using webhost4life (link in my sig) to
host your web services. That's what I use and at $9.95 a month it comes
with a lot of SQL Server space. I run web sites that have chat systems and
real time desktops showing who is online and exactly where they are in the
site. They hit the web services at a rate of about 2000-2500 hits per
minute and I havn't noticed any problems. Good luck! Ken.

P.S. By asking grandmothers to install a web server and give you some of
their bandwidth you are putting them at a *HUGE* security risk that you
can't possibly ask them to keep up with themselves.