Best Choice of ASP Windows Hosting

More dynamic websites are now being created using the ASP.NET language,resulting in web hosts rushing to provide customers with ASP web hosting. ASP web hosting really needs to be based on the Microsoft Windows Server operating system (Windows 2003 Server) which ASP.NET was designed to run on.

Your ASP web hosts will provide you with a control panel to fully manage your ASP web hosting, running on Windows servers. The most popular Windows based control panels at the moment are the popular Parallels Plesk control panel and Helm which both allow you to manage all aspects of your ASP.NET based web applications.

Windows Hosting Control Panels also give you access to the installed of Microsoft SQL Server, ensuring full integration between your ASP.NET applications and MS-SQL. From the control panel you will be able to manage your remotely hosted databases, create users, set passwords and define permissions and security settings.

Like any standard shared hosting account your host will provide you with FTP access to your ASP Web Hosting account to allow you to upload your web files and scripts. Development software such as Microsoft Visual Studio have built in FTP to allow you to upload.

Every web hosting account allows access via FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to allow files to be uploaded to their web space. Its also possible to upload files using the Control Panel’s built in File Manager, which has an “Explorer” like interface allowing your browse, drag and drop files from your desktop to server.

If your scripts were developed in a Microsoft environment you may find it more reliable and less frustrating to host them on Microsoft servers as there are a few subtle differences between Linux and Windows hosts (such as file and case sensitivity). ASP and ASP.NET should really only run on Microsoft Windows Server operating systems. Some hosts do offer “ASP Hosting” running on Linux servers, using using the Sun Chilisoft ASP Environment.

ASP hosting was originally a “niche market” with relatively few specialists, but has increased in popularity, partly due to ready developed packages and greater awareness and competition . Backwards compatibility was maintained by Microsoft, so older asp applications should work on servers running the newer scripting environment.

If your web site only needs static html pages, or perhaps open source scripting technologies such as PHP, Perl or Python then a standard Linux shared hosting package should suffice. Windows based ASP web hosting package is really only required if your scripts or applications demand ASP and ASP.NET.

Some people have chosed Windows Web Hosting in the past because thats what their desktop PC runs. The choice of your home PC operating system has no bearing on your choice of Linux our Windows host, unless you have used your own PC to develop Windows applications.