Set up staging and production environmets and minimizing downtime on simple hosting

I have an ASP.NET MVC 3 application, WouldBeBetter.com, currently hosted on Windows Azure. I have an Introductory Special subscription package that was free for several months but was surprised at how expensive it has turned out to be (€150 p/m on average!) now that I have started paying for it. That is just way too much money for a site that is not going to generate money any time soon so I've decided to move to a regular hosting provider (DiscountASP.Net).

One of the things I'll truly miss though, is the separated Staging and Production environment开发者_如何学JAVAs Azure provides, along with the zero-downtime environment swap.

My question is, how could I go about "simulating" a staging environment while hosting on a traditional provider? And what is my best shot at minimizing downtime on new deployments?

Thanks.

UPDATE: I chose the answer I chose not because I consider it the best method, but because it is what makes the most sense for me at this point.

Before abandoning Windows Azure, there are several cost-saving things you can do to lower your monthly bill. For instance:

• If you have both a Web role and a Worker role, merge the two. Take your background processing, queue processing, etc. and run them in your Web role (do your time-consuming startup in OnStart(), then just add a Run() override to call queue-processing, etc.
• Consider the new Extra Small instance, which costs just under half of a Small instance
• Delete your Staging deployment after you're confident your production code is running ok. Keep the cspkg handy though, in blob storage, so that you could always re-deploy it.

I use DiscountASP myself. It's pretty basic hosting for sure, a little behind the times. But I have found just creating a subdirectory and publishing my beta/test/whatever versions there works pretty well. It's not fancy or pretty, but does get the job done.

In order to do this you need to create the subdirectory first, then go into the control panel and tell DASP that directory is an application. Then you also have to consider that directory's web.config is going to be a combination of its own and the parent one. You also have to consider robots.txt for this subdirectory and protecting it in general from nosy people.

You could probably pull this off with subdomains too, depending on how your domain is set up.

Another option: appharbor? They have a free plan. If you can stay within the confines of their free plan, it might work well (I've never used them, currently interested in trying them though)

1) Get an automated deployment tool. There are plenty of free/open-source ones that million/billion dollar companies actually use for their production environments.

2) Get a second hosting package identical to the first. Use it as your staging, then just redeploy to production when staging passes.