Hosting ASP.NET MVC applications

Ok, i have had FUN working with ASP.NET MVC (the official site, more info on Scott Gu’s Blog) Preview 3. I was doing some fun stuff.  Wanting to  play with different technologies of late, i found (really found) ways to use LINQ (to SQL, to XML, and on Entities). To complement all this i have used JQUERY with very good plugins like “Listen” and “SuperFlyDom”.

This whole thing is very cool and works great on my local machine with Vista Ultimate running IIS7. I was excited and wanted to put it on my hosting account only to realize, my hosting account only supports IIS6 (some cheap Shared Hosting, right!). Now, all my pretty looking URL are going to look bad with that “.MVC” extension, right?. After a quick a google search, i found an interesting idea on doing a ReWrites with ISAPI modules. Having done this a lot in my previous jobs, i assumed the job.

My Host, does not support main ISAPI_ReWrite modules, and kind of suggested me to get “LinkFreeze” from the same company. In my excitement to get my website online, i bought that license (about $50.00) and asked my hosting provider to install and let me know how to set up the configuration i needed to do.

Apparently, this is quite different from the main module and is very limited in what it does. I finally figured (or not) that this is not the right software for what i wanted to do.

Now, i am in the HUNT for Web Host.

Either a decent Windows Serer 2008 Shared Host with reasonable SQL Serever Space or a Virtual Dedicated Windows Server 2003 (then i can install SQL Serer Express).

I would appreciate any feed back with your hosting providers. I have had some bad experiences with couple over this last weekend.

(One Provider went on to say that i can install ISAPI_Rewrite module and assured me that all the things i am asking for are already in the package, only for the Tech REP to tell me, after sign-up, that they don’t support it.) Now, i am canceling that account and asking for a refund. Please share your experience.

The solution i am mentioning about hosing ASP.NET MVC apps with pretty URLs on IIS6 are This ONE and This ONE.

Good Luck Hosting with hosting ASP.NET MVC apps. Microsoft, Could you Please provide us some DEV HOSTING PACKAGES for some decent price to play with new technologies. Thanks!!!

3 thoughts on “Hosting ASP.NET MVC applications

  1. I hope that I can share a bit about my experience in selecting an asp.net mvc host for my site. There are several minimum requirements that I need:

    The host must be able to host my asp.net mvc site in both IIS6 and IIS7 (I am a developer and I am running a test on both system)
    The hosting price is reasonable
    Support is responsive
    Great, feature-rich control panel which allows me to do almost everything instantly
    I was researching several alternatives and I narrow down my choice into ASPHostCentral (http://www.asphostcentral.com). I contacted them and asked several features about ASP.NET MVC. Their support is very responsive and they look very knowledgeable and professional to me. The good thing is that they support asp.net mvc on both IIS6 and IIS7 and this exactly matched my top requirements. I then registered for a plan which costs me $4.99/month. I was then given a control panel access and I am truly impressed with the things that I can do on their control panel. I found more than 60 ready, free applications that I can instantly install. Amazing!

    My ASP.NET MVC site is up instantly and everything looks incredibly good . The server and site performance are excellent. Well, with just $4.99/month, this host is truly a recommended one. I certainly would noy mind to refer my business partners to them in the future!

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