ScottGu's Blog

# Windows Gate.com Free Beta Web Hosting

Check it out. Affinity Internet is running an open beta for their latest platform, Gate.com. The beta includes ASP.NET 2.0 and is a great place to test out your code and site to see how they run before making them live on your existing plans, wherever those may be, or if you like the platform purchasing a plan when it launches.

No domain transfer necessary. They create a trial domain for you.

You can get to it here:

https://my.gate.com/beta/order/domain.htm

Fully redundant solution, load-balanced web servers, etc.

# re: Free ASP.NET 2.0 + SQL Express 30 Day Hosting Offer

Scott,

While on this topic; the situation regarding SQL Express is still a mess. I thought your team (or the SQL Server team), would have spent the last 2 years charming and providing incentives to the hosting community such they they would include an instance of SQL Express on their IIS 6 web servers. 3 Weeks ago I wanted to find a new hosting company, and spend half a day looking, but discovered that 95%+ of the ones listed *do not* support just uploading SQL Express databases, which was one of the biggest benefits of using that product with ASP.NET 2. Most are still just running SQL Server 2000 on a secondary server, where you need to use some terrible web interface to create table or upload data in csv format.

I ended up purchasing a Virtual Dedicated Server so I could get remote desktop access. I could not believe I had done that at the end of the day! All I wanted was a $10 hosting account where I could upload a simple SQL Express database.......But ended up buying a entire virtual dedicated server just so save me all the headaches.

Microsoft needs to work with the major hosting companies pronto on this....or all that effort put into dynamically loading SQL Express databases will be wasted :-(

Thanks,

David Taylor

# re: Free ASP.NET 2.0 + SQL Express 30 Day Hosting Offer

Czech Republic is just a small country but we have at least 2 good free ASP.NET 2.0 hostings. Slovak Republic, our sibling, also have couple of them.

Your post sounds like that the 30 day offer is something great which is quite weird to me when there are at least 4 good free services in my small country.

# re: Free ASP.NET 2.0 + SQL Express 30 Day Hosting Offer

It absolutely shocks me how programmers push for dirt cheap, bargain basement prices and ask for free services yet are in the IT business themselves trying to command $150 an hour because they provide a "high quality service".

Any host worth anything is not going to offer ASP.NET and SQL Server for less than $15-$20 per month.

If they are, you better be highly questionable of how they are making their money, if they are making any at all. Think about it.

You expect hosts to pay for Microsoft licensing, offer high quality hardware, 99.99% uptime guarantee, enterprise routing, redundant connections, 24 hour toll free phone support, huge amounts of space and mega loads of bandwidth. On top of that you only want less than 100 websites per server, ask for thousands of dollars in components, expensive software and enterprise backups too. You also expect a team of highly skilled, knowledgeable DBAs, Server Technicians and Customer Service reps.

If a host were to only charge $5.00 per month, 1 simple phone call or support email would kill the profit margin completely.

It' simply not worth it.

Even if the host puts 300 websites per server, offered no technical support and cheap hardware and connections, its still not worth it. They are not going to make any money!

I think a lot of you are forgetting that in IT, you get what you pay for. This applies to programmers and Web Hosting too.

Stop being cheap. You're a "programmer" for christ's sake. If you can't afford $15.00 a month to ensure your website is up and running and that someone will always be there when you need it, I suggest you look for another source of income. $15.00 per month is $0.50 per day! Are you telling me you don't want to pay $0.50 per day for a quality web host?

It honestly shocks me how programmers command high rates, but are so cheap that they don't want to pay $0.50 per day to keep a website up and running.

Programmers of all people should realize the concept of "you get what you pay for" and people need to be willing to pay a little more for quality.

I think both experienced and learning programmers need to think about these things before looking for a "Cheap Host".

Anyone claming to be a programmer, or even a learning programmer, and is asking for ASP.NET/SQL Server 2005 hosting for $5.00 per month is just out of touch and doing the ASP.NET Programming Community and entire Web Community a huge disservice.

Programmers should be the ones wanting, and suggesting to others to pay for a quality host, not trying to kill the market by commanding dirt cheap prices!

# re: Free ASP.NET 2.0 + SQL Express 30 Day Hosting Offer

Just so the comment above does not seem out of place, this was mainly in response to:

http://www.coveryourasp.net/Under5Dollars (James Shaw comments: "A couple of years ago Scott Guthrie mentioned at dinner one evening that his goal was to encourage hosting companies to offer ASP.NET hosting with SQL Server for under $5 a month")

# Re: Free ASP.NET 2.0 + SQL Express 30 Day Hosting Offer

http://www.aspspider.net offers ASP.NET 2.0 completely free and unlimited hosting + SQL Express; the only limit is that they don't give domain names to everyone but just to selected members. Here the rules: http://www.aspspider.net/tips/Tip6.aspx

# re: Free ASP.NET 2.0 + SQL Express 30 Day Hosting Offer

Hi David,

We have a SQL Express uploading tool currently in beta that any hoster is able to use (we are working with about 2 dozen hosters to test it). Once it finishes the beta period we are going to be *very* aggresive promoting it and encourage everyone to offer it.

Hope this helps,

Scott

# re: Free ASP.NET 2.0 + SQL Express 30 Day Hosting Offer

Hi Eric,

My comment to James a few years ago was related to the fact that one of the things that made PHP more attractive to a lot of web developers was the fact that it was possible to get cheap web hosting -- much cheaper than the ASP.NET equivalent. We heard this a lot from customers who wanted low-price offerings for home and hobbyst use.

One of the things we have done over the last few years is worked with hosters to fix some of the licensing issues they had (specifically around SQL server pricing), as well as worked to increase the number of sites that can be hosted on a single box, and improved diagnostics to lower TCO. The result is the ability for hosters to optionally offer cheap offerings that matched their PHP/Linux equivalents -- and ensured that hosting price is no longer a reason to choose something other than ASP.NET if you absolutely want to pay as little as possible for a basic hosting account.

As you say above, the service quality you might get for $5 a month will be a lot less than what hosters offering $15-20 a month offer (you'll also probably get less bandwidth, SQL and file storage). Developers should think hard about the quality of service guarentees they want, and the level of service they require.

Clearly you wouldn't want to run a mission critical business application on a $5 shared host server account. However, if you have a site you are just trying out (or sharing with friends) and want to use it to program or blog for fun -- then having low-price offerings is something that is attractive.

Hope this helps,

Scott

# re: Free ASP.NET 2.0 + SQL Express 30 Day Hosting Offer

CrystalTech http://www.crystaltech.com/developershared.htm is offering developer accounts starting at $2.95 with a 30mb SQL Server database.

Great service!
I've been a happy customer for about 5 years.

# Awesome ASP.NET 2.0 RSS Tool-Kit Released

Dmitry on the ASP.NET Team posted an awesome RSS Toolkit for ASP.NET 2.0 on his blog earlier tonight. ...

# re: Free ASP.NET 2.0 + SQL Express 30 Day Hosting Offer

vwd.hosting/database image filepaths This is probably a very simple uestion but I would appreciate some help. I have recently uploaded my site to vwd.hosting for testing and everything works fine except for the image file paths in the database. The file manager shows a file path of d:/users/terryito-1 / ProductImages /Chair.jpg i have tried the above and every combination i can think of including /terryito-1 / ProductImages /Chair.jpg (With and without the spaces) but I cannot get the images to load. Does anyone have any ideas many thanks martin

# re: Free ASP.NET 2.0 + SQL Express 30 Day Hosting Offer

WebHostForASP.net http://www.webhostforasp.net also offer Windows Hosting + SQL Express for just $4.50 a month. And they also have tools to upload or attach your local sql express database. And I think that hosting plans below 5 is good idea cause a lots of programmers outside US cannot afford 15 dollars USD a month. For them it might be expensive when it get converted to their currency, and also they might be doing that for their hobby and doesnt require lots of support or uptime.

# re: Free ASP.NET 2.0 + SQL Express 30 Day Hosting Offer

Regarding WebHostForASP, I've been with them for about 3 months now and my site has been down several times each week. They have no means of monitoring their servers and there are clients on them abusing them. It's too bad that don't because they would be a good value. We are having to move our site off now. Just thought I would try to save anyone else the trouble.