Current as of July 2010

ASP.NET HostingASP.NET Hosting

Shared Hosting | VPS Hosting | Dedicated Hosting

Microsoft ASP.NET is a great web framework for developing web applications and sites in Visual Studio with C#, Visual Basic, or any other .NET enabled programming language. The real issue starts when you want to deploy your ASP.NET application with a hosting company.

In theory, ASP.NET hosting is very simple as the stack is composed of the following:

In practice however, getting ASP.NET hosting right is hard - and it takes real expertise and dedication.

What to look for in an ASP.NET Hosting company?

A good hosting provider will take care of hardware failures, network outages, hardware and software upgrades, patching security vulnerabilities in your deployment stack, backups, and disaster recovery. It's important to choose an ASP.NET hosting company you can trust. This is particularly true for Microsoft hosting, because historically Microsoft Windows has been more prone to security vulnerabilities and attacks than other operating systems that are based on Unix. All this rings true even if you were to choose Mono hosting (hosting ASP.NET on Linux through the open source Mono project).

After this short premise, please find below a list of the best ASP.NET hosting companies that we know of and recommend - and trust us, we've tried quite a few. These are hosting companies that we trust fully; they specialize in Windows, ASP (classic), ASP.NET and MSSQL Server hosting. In our opinion, they are the best ASP.NET companies on the market today. They don't overload their Windows servers, provide amazing customer care, and are able to do so at a very affordable price.

Shared ASP.NET Hosting

Budget: Less than $10

Shared hosting is your most affordable choice for hosting ASP.NET applications. If you have millions of page views per month, shared hosting is not for you though because your site will be hosted on the same server as many other sites. If however, you're looking for a cheap entry level hosting solution, a shared plan can be a sensible starting point (shared hosting is fully managed for you). Sadly, this is also one of the most crowded spaces as many hosts are trying to get a piece of the pie by overselling their servers (by hosting far too many sites on the same machine, however powerful the server is). Thankfully, our recommended hosting companies don't partake in such practices.

Arvixe Review

ASP.NET HostingArvixe is a company that specialized in ASP.NET shared hosting, they offer incredibly inexpensive, high-quality plans starting at just $5 a month! It doesn't get any cheaper than that. They employ the latest in monitoring and rapid response technology to make sure that your server is operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Their uptime is in fact unparalleled for a shared host. Not being a huge company, they can afford to tend to the needs of every single customer. As well they also throw in a domain name for life and countless other bonus features. In our humble opinion, Arvixe is the best ASP.NET shared hosting provider within this price range. CHECK OUT ARVIXE.

ASP.NET-related details:

Price: From $5/mo

Virtual Private Server (VPS) ASP.NET Hosting

Budget: Between $39.95 and $69.95

Unlike shared hosting where your ASP.NET site is hosted on the same server as many others sites, with a virtual private server you get your own Windows server box that is contained within a virtual machine that runs on very powerful, server grade hardware. Usually this expensive hardware (with its many CPU cores and GBs of RAM) will only be shared by a handful of customers, giving you plenty of resource allocation. VPS hosting is the ideal hosting solution for launching ASP.NET applications. You get enough resources to keep your site operating quickly, ensuring it's able to stay responsive under a weighty stress load, while not having to pay the high fees associated with dedicated ASP.NET hosting. It's the perfect compromise for budget hosting.

MyHosting.com Review

ASP.NET HostingMyHosting is a well trusted hosting company that's been in operation since 1997. They were one of the first to provide high-quality ASP.NET VPS hosting. They offer two Windows Virtual Server hosting plans tailored to the most demanding of ASP.NET applications. These are based on a virtualization solution offered by Microsoft (Hyper-V), low server density to leave you with plenty of resources, plus their unmatched 99.9% Hardware and Network Service Level Agreement (SLA), and 24/7 technical support. You can really count of these guys, and in our experience, their fully managed VPS are both affordable and as good as this type of hosting gets. For those who are interested, they offer shared hosting, too, which is equally top-notch, as well as SharePoint hosting. CHECKOUT MYHOSTING.

ASP.NET-related details:

Price: From $39.95/mo

Dedicated ASP.NET Hosting

Budget: More than $149

Dedicated hosting is the real deal. You get a genuine machine that's fully dedicated to your ASP.NET applications and sites. All the resources are allocated to you and you alone. Dedicated ASP.NET hosting is ideal for those who need to host multiple ASP.NET sites, popular services, or demanding applications. It's slightly more expensive, but worth every penny if it's within the scope of your budget. Our recommendation below is very affordable, particularly for managed dedicated hosting, were the host takes care of virtually everything for you.

Liquid Web Review

ASP.NET HostingLiquid Web is, in our opinion, the best managed, dedicated hosting provider in the world. Their prices are incredibly affordable for a managed solution, and they cost even less than most unmanaged servers. They guarantee 100% network uptime (their datacenters are notoriously reliable and secure), and 24/7 dedicated technical support (that they rightfully call "heroic"). When you pick your hosting server, you can choose between Windows Server 2003 or 2008. Starting at $149, their offer is simply stunning if you need a dedicated hosting provider. They also offer ASP.NET shared and VPS hosting, but dedicated hosting is where they shine. CHECKOUT LIQUID WEB.

Price: From $149/mo

Just to be clear: everything we wrote in this article also applies to if you're searching for Microsoft hosting (and Windows hosting), ASP hosting, .NET hosting, ASP.NET MVC hosting and SQL Server hosting.