Windows Hosting | Tips to Choosing Best ASP.NET Hosting Provider

BestWindowsHostingASP.NET - This article contains tips and caveats for anyone who is looking to deploy their ASP.NET web application with a web hosting provider. This article does not recommend a specific web hosting provider, but only provides information. Every application will have different needs and requirements, so ultimately the choice will be up to you to select an appropriate web hosting provider that best meets those specific needs.

ASP.NET hosting has been getting the attentions from clients especially the massive new generations of .NET developers. ASP.NET hosting services have been rapidly grown its popularity over 40% of the hosting industry. 

As the expensive Microsoft software licenses including Windows Server and MSSQL Server, some of people doesn’t like using Windows. Recently, with Microsoft technology being more and more mature and popular, some reputed web hosting companies have started to offer ASP.NET hosting service.

What You Need to Consider

Web site hosting can range from free, to a couple dollars a month, to several hundred dollars a month. The first step is to identify what your application needs, versus what the host can offer for their price. Make a list of the technologies and requirements for your application with special attention to the following:

- How much disk space does your application require? You need to check your site whether your site requires many space like music streaming or video, then you need to find out the hosting provider that offer large amounts of disk space.

- The second is bandwith. How much bandwith do you need? Hmm… This is quite difficult to check your bandwith. Most of small business requires only 2-4 GB/month. If you run corporate business, then it will eat 10 GB above/month.

- What type of database does your application require? Does your hosting provider support your database version? The best asp.net hosting provider will support the latest SQL version.

- Next to consider is how much space does your database require? Most of hosting provider will provide 100-200 MB on their lowest plan. If you need more resources, then you need to purchase an addon or upgrade to their higher package.

- Do you need email account for your business? Most hosting provider will provide FREE email for you. Some of providers provide you to create unlimited email accounts and some of provider only provide 10 mail accounts on their lowest plan. 

Tips to Choosing Best ASP.NET Hosting

Here are several points that you need to evaluate when choosing ASP.NET hosting provider.

Technology

You need to check whether your hosting provider support the latest Microsoft ASP.NET hosting version. As I have written above, the good ASP.NET hosting provider will follow new changes and support the newest version. So, if you run newest version, then your application will run perfectly.

Reliability

You might want to know a bit about the provider’s infrastructure. Find out if they have redundant connections to the Internet. You can also ask about a provider’s reliability in newsgroups and email forms, but take any third party feedback from an un-trusted source with a grain of salt. Many more people are likely to complain about small problems then they are to praise small successes. For example, you can type keyword “XXX hosting review” or “XXX hosting performance” or “XXX hosting downtime”.

Backup

Does the hosting provider provide the backup? You need to make sure about that. So, if something happened, then you can easily restore your files. Find out how often they backup your files and your databases. That’s very important then price.

Control Panel

Check the Control Panel that your hosting provider. Most ASP.NET hosting provider use Plesk Control Panel for ASP.NET or DotNetPanel. Then, how to upload your files to the server? Using FTP, WebDeploy, FileManager or etc?

For SQL Server, a hosting provider should allow you to connect directly with a tool like Visual Studio .NET, Enterprise Manager, or Query Analyzer (of the three, Query Analyzer may be the preferred tool because of the three it is the least chatty). If the hosting provider only offers a web interface, you may face difficulty in using standard tools and scripts when installing, maintaining, and updating your database.

Security

For ASP.NET, you always need to check that your hosting provider keeps update their patches in order to avoid security issues. Ask them how they apply this securities issue.

Permission

You need also to ask your hosting provider whether they provide full trust, medium trust or low trust hosting. Most ASP.NET hosting provider now support full trust hosting. If your application require full trust permission, then it will run fine if your hosting provider support full trust.

Other Specific Requirements

For example if you need SSRS or Crystal Report. Before register their hosting plan, ask them they support this feature or not. Do you need to pay for this feature? How much?

Recommendation for ASP.NET Hosting

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Recommendation ASP.NET Hosting Provider