Is it possible to have a website remotely hosted, which would access local database?

Hi everybody,

Currently we have a MIS application, developed in VB 6.0 - SQL Server 2000 platform, which is used by around 60 users in our office.

We are planning to host a website remotely, which would allow clients to place orders, track order status etc. on it.

Would it be possible to access our local SQL database from the remote website?

utpal_nandi:

Would it be possible to access our local SQL database from the remote website?

I'm afraid, it won't be possible. You should host the database also.

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Well I guess in theory that's not impossible. It might be impracticle though...

When you say "our local SQL database", is that hosted on a dedicated box? You could open that up for remote (read: internet) connections. That would allow your web server to access it.

However, that probably won't save you any time and will deprive you of an in house server that could be used for testing, etc. Also, it'll probably be slower for the webserver to query your sql server over the internet than it would be to query another server on its own network (if you hosted the database at the same place you host the website).

So you asked if it would be possible, and the answer is yes, but I wouldn't actually recommend it.

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What do you mean by "dedicated box"? Do you mean dedicated server? We will be having a dedicated server on Windows 2000 Datacenter edition on which the database as well as the web server (IIS) would be installed. The web server would be opened up for remote connections through a static IP.

Regarding the time factor, 90% of our data entry and database access would be done by our office staff on our local database, which would be faster than doing the same on a remote database. Moreover in case of a remote database, if our internet connection fails, our work would get held up. Only 10% of data entry and database access would be done by our clients in case of a local database, which would be slow and could be alternatively done by our local staff in case the internet connection fails.

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Hi,

Regarding the time factor, 90% of our data entry and database access would be done by our office staff on our local database, which would be faster than doing the same on a remote database.

From your description, I think that you can make your MIS system connect to the local database first, and then update the data to the live server in a schedule plan. To achieve this, one of the ways is to create a step job in SQLServer Agent, and make your remote database be synchronized with your local database server.

Besides, if you are using Visual Studio Team Suite, you can start a Database project, in that project, you can deploy your local database to your remote server in an easy way, meantime, schema comparison and data comparison between databases on different servers are enabled, you can make different databases be synchronized more easier than before.

Thanks.