Advice on testing neatComponents

Cloud vs Physical or Virtual Servers
You can use an AWS EC2 cloud instance at very low initial cost. This is usually the best choice for initial deployment.

neatComponents self installs onto Windows operating systems in a hassle free way. During the initial installation it will check which  Windows services it needs you to enable and notify you. For system security reasons neatComponents can't turn these on for you.

Troubleshooting
The installation process is normally trouble-free. You are only likely to have issues if the machine you are testing on has previously had web-server or database software^Tip installed. Sometimes, even uninstalling the previous software can still leave you with problems - some open-source uninstall routines don't set your machine back to its original state.

If you find yourself in a situation where neatComponents simply will not install no matter what you do, we recommend running your trial in a Cloud instance. This is quite straightforward . Read more...

*W2003 'Domain Controller' 
It is not possible to install version 1.2.1457 or below on a Windows 2003 server instance that has been configured to be a Domain Controller. Please use one of the alternate methods or contact us for more advice.
 

Total Cost of Ownership
We recommend careful consideration is given to overall costs of using suitably sized cloud servers for production usage compared to using a local physical or hosted dedicated/virtual server. Cloud installations have many advantages in being 'instantly' available and flexible in size and can eliminate many of the hassles of server ownership, but they can cost more than 'traditional' hosted systems taken over the average three-year life of a server. Remember to consider server capacity, service availablity, backup & restore and data security in your price comparison.

It is a trivial task to transfer (export/import) a complete neatComponents application or site from one environment to another, so it is quite practical to move a trial created on, say, the cloud to a local machine - or vice versa.