THS Articles

Web Hosting Basics: ASP.NET Hosting

By Sangeetha Naik

One of the recent trends in site design, is increasingly complex and highly dynamic Web pages. The businesses that are supporting these websites are demanding more and more from their websites, so developers are trying to build even more sophisticated websites.

That is one of the reasons that the developer community has been eager to learn more about the opportunities afforded by Microsoft ASP.NET. This set of technologies in the Microsoft .NET Framework offers the ability to develop complex, highly dynamic websites more quickly and efficiently than ever before.

In order to build customer sites on the ASP.NET platform, developers must rely on ASP.NET hosting providers. Many Web hosts are realizing the unique opportunity in this growing interest in ASP.NET, and are gearing to offer ASP.NET Hosting.

The key to ASP.NET hosting is Developer orientation. Developers are the key decision makers in their companies for this type of hosting. They want to make sure that their apps will work on the Web host's platform. The key question Web hosts interested in Technology Hosting need to ask is, how best to support developers who want to build complex websites cost-effectively. How to maintain a hosting framework that will support such websites cost-effectively is another question. One of the ways for this, is to consider developer oriented services running on ASP.NET running on Microsoft Windows Server 2003.

Pros and Cons of ASP.NET for Developers and Web Hosts

For Developers

ASP.NET is a truly Object oriented language, with sophisticated object oriented features supported. Object oriented programmers can easily get used to this new environment. Another benefit is that developers have language flexibility, which means they can write code in various languages.

A major strength of the ASP.NET platform is in its Development Environment. Developers can use WebMatrix (a free IDE), or Visual Studio .NET or Borlands tools like Delphi or C++ builder. This reduces the time to develop code, by at least 2-3 times. Tools like Visual Studio has a sophisticated debugging environment including breakpoints and tracing sections of code.

ASP.NET is an improvement over ASP. ASP.NET compiles code for execution and It also detects change and recompiles code automatically. The result is a three to five fold increase in the performance of classic ASP apps when they move to an ASP.NET platform. However, ASP.NET consumes more memory and is somewhat slower than the competitor platform, PHP.

For Web Hosts

Web hosts that are eager to offer a new developer-oriented service on ASP.NET, can best do it based on the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 operating system using Microsoft ASP.NET.

Companies like Verio which have adopted the ASP.NET platform in their hosting offerings, claim that with ASP.NET plus IIS 6.0, they have been able to host nearly twice as many websites on a shared server as it could under earlier versions of IIS.

ASP.NET hosting also means more opportunities for upselling developer-oriented services. Developers who start a customer site using a Microsoft Access or SQL Server Desktop database can move a customer over to the Web host's Shared SQL Server offering as site growth warrants.

What do you need setup for ASP.NET Hosting

Operating system and platform

The best platform to run .NET apps are Windows 2003 operating system with .NET Framework Version 2.0. You can download the .NET Framework 2.0 at Design packages free of cost. The Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0 (x86) redistributable package installs the .NET Framework runtime and associated files required to run applications developed to target the .NET Framework v2.0. Many ASP.NET Web hosts also provide .NET Framework 1.1, which supports ASP.NET 1.1.