Hi peeps,

 

I know I'm a newby here, so apologies for the new topic so soon, but I'm after a bit of advice really. I want to host a site on my .co.uk domain. Currently, I don't plan it to be a website per say, its more of a development platform for experimenting and learning web skills - so size isn't necessarily an issue. I also would like to have database access, not bothered as to which I get access to - MySQL is what I’ve been using so, as long as it’s not too different that’s fine. It does need to be ASP based though, I started learning ASP so I have more experience with it than PHP at the moment.

 

Any suggestions would be really helpful, anything to escape from Fasthosts before they consume my soul !!

Are you looking for shared hosting or sommet like a VPS which is more suited for developer environments because you have total access and no restrictions.

If you need an environment to simply learn new stuff in, why not check out the Microsoft Development Platform tools.

You can install everything you need on your own computer and have a nice IDE, access to SQL Server Management Studio and a web server.

 

I know Microsoft get a hard time in some quarters, but I really can't fault their Express editions - great freebies.

 

Link

@ Peartree

 

I don't think I need it to be a VPS, it's not so much total control over the server I'm after, rather I want there to be a structure to support the site already in place, i.e. the database and the server language to operate the web application. My idea was to use somthing like these Link, put one on the server, and dismantle it and learn from it. The way I've leaned ASP is very disjointed, as I have some very large holes in my understanding of creating dynamic sites.

 

@ LeeSalter

 

Admittedly this is cheaper, but I'm not so confident in setting up a local server that would function in the same way as a hosted solution. Setting up IIS I've done, but little more than that.

Feel free to have a look at our Windows Hosting solutions, we provide Classic ASP, ASP.net, MySQL 4/5, Microsoft Access and SQL Server 2008 perfect to kick start your website development/testing!

We could help if it was a VPS but we cant do windows shared hosting yet

 

Take a look at Carl (CS New Media)

I can certainly vouch for CS New Media, I opened a hosting account with them yesterday. My domain was visible on the internet within an hour, with .NET 3.5 SP1 (I use Entity Framework heavily (which is brilliant, btw)) and a SQL Server 2008 DB! Absolutely 1st class and top notch.

 

@ LeeSalter

 

Admittedly this is cheaper, but I'm not so confident in setting up a local server that would function in the same way as a hosted solution. Setting up IIS I've done, but little more than that.

 

The key with it really is to make sure that you create a Web Application rather than a Web Site in Visual Web Developer Express. A Web Site in .NET compiles on the fly and Entity Framework classes, for example, cannot do this in a partially trusted environment. With a Web Application, everything is pre-compiled and so this is not a problem.