Awesome ASP.NET 2.0 Shared Web Hosting

Ok, I’ll throw the disclaimer up front.  If you sign up using the link below, I get a referral commission.  With that said, I’m going to try to give a fair review of my current hosting service, Webhost4Life.

A while back I decided that I needed to find a new hosting provider.  My old host had limited support for ASP.Net, and although they allowed multiple domains to be hosted on one account, they required that they all be pointed to the root directory of the hosting account.  This made it necessary to have a gimmicky default.aspx that redirected by the host header, and didn’t support having full web applications in subdirectories.

I ran through trials on several hosts, and ended up signing on with Webhost4life.  I’m on the $20 per month plan, and am very happy with the interfaces that they provide.  The big bonuses in my mind are:

• I can point any domain name to a subdirectory in my hosting account.
  
• I can set any directory in my hosting account as an independent web application, through the web control panel.
  
• I have access to SQL server, My SQL, etc.
  
• They have a decent online interface for setting file & directory security permissions.
  
• They will put you on a server that has the beta .Net framework 2.0 if you ask through tech support.

On the down-side, I have found that they have a tendency to nickel-and-dime for many features.  It’s free to point a new domain to your hosting root, but if you want it pointed to a subdirectory, it’s an extra $10 a year.  Want to use their e-commerce wizard (it’s not that great) then there’s a one-time setup fee.  When they switched me over to the server with the 2.0 framework, there was a one-time fee (and some downtime) since they manually copied my websites over.

Overall I’ve been very happy.  My family picture website runs great, and much faster than on my old host.  Dasblog was very easy to setup, and I’ve got a couple of side projects using ASP.Net with the 2.0 framework, and they’re working great as well.

If you want to found out more, click here, and feel free to comment or email with questions.

Update 7/13/2005: I’m not sure what the problem is yet, but my hosting server has been having some random failings lately.  It usually comes back within a couple of minutes, but the reliability isn’t quite up to par for business purposes.  Just a fair warning for anyone taking the ASP.NET 2.0 route. I never had any reliability problems before I moved to the server with the ASP.NET 2.0 Beta.  To be fair, it is a beta.

Update2 7/13/2005: I had tech support switch the virtual directory for my blog site back to ASP.NET 1.1 and everything appears to be working fine now, and I haven’t had any site drops since.