.NET hosting for demo projects.

Question

I am a Java programmer looking to learn .NET, particularly C# and F#, to improve my employability. Toward this goal I am creating a website which will have a few demo projects. My hope is to learn C#/F# and the .NET framework by creating this website and then have a finished product to self-advertise and to show potential employers.

What I need is a good host.

My priorities are cost, stability, and capability. I might be willing to pay up to around $10/mo, but I don't really want to pay more than $5/mo. Stability and performance have to be reasonable. I want access to all the commonly-used .NET tools (SQLServer, LINQ, C#, F#, VB, MVC, any other stuff I might reasonably need that I don't know about yet). Basically I don't really know what I want besides room for my projects to grow as my expertise grows.

EDIT: Some have expressed concern that I shouldn't pay for time before my project is ready-to go. However, my hope is to get it up in less than a month, so I'm not too worried about paying for time before that.

Answer 1

My advice: If you can afford hosting a virtual machine in your own computer, or using a spare machine from a friend or relative, take it as your "development server". Learn and deploy there, and when you are satisfied with your work, go online. Then, if you can afford an internet connection 24/7 with a public IP addres, you can be your own host! Services like no-ip allow you to have a free domain re-directed to your own machine.

Answer 2

Do you have an extra box? Why not just host it yourself off your internet connection and use dyndns so you can use cnames to point your domain to your server?

(I'm not sure how common using F# is in ASP.Net... or if it's even possible.)

Answer 3

What time frame do you have? I would strongly suggest not purchasing hosting until you have your project ready to deploy, because you may waste a month or two of hosting money.

That said, I highly recommend DiscountASP. They stay on top of the MS stack really hard. I had ASP.NET MVC installed the day it was released, for example, and they have a lot of experience tweaking the environment to match your needs.

EDIT: To more clearly answer your question, ASP.NET, MVC, Linq, SQL Server 2005 or 2008 (choice), SQL Server Express, etc. are preinstalled. I know someone who runs F# code there as well, but I cannot say whether or not he requested it. I do know its not costing him extra.

Answer 4

How about an Amazon EC2 virtual machine? Just fire it up when you need it, and pay only for the time its running.

Mono have a Visual Studio Plugin in the works, that will automatically start up an EC2 machine for you and start running/debugging your app.

Answer 5

The honest answer is that you cannot do that for $10 or less. The .NET platform (with the exception of Mono) runs under licensed software and so that platform obviously costs more money for hosting companies than deployments of Linux based systems.

Answer 6

I was thinking similarly too. I decided to open a blog site* to post my code, resume, and other related stuff as a career boosting tool. I tried to make it dev. oriented too.

As for .NET hosting, I've got a friend who uses GoDaddy for his website.

Other than setting up a Wordpress or other blogging software, I'd probably do what nairdaen suggested.

Answer 7

I second the DiscountAsp hosting service with Josh Jordan. i have used them for a number of projects and have several sites running with them currently. They're not as fancy as some other hosting providers but they are SOLID. (By fancy i mean some of the quick start bells and whistles such as web site templates.) Better yet, they feel like a developer's host. For example, i do a great deal of Sql Server work and i can connect from my own IDE from anywhere. Many hosts require you to use a custom, web-based IDE that does not work nearly as well as the MS client.

Get this: Have you ever known any other hosting service that has a "Account Cancellation" link on their site? Yes. These guys are so confident that they don't force you to go through hoops if you decide you want to opt out! That takes some brass b@lls! Better yet, they can back it up.

Answer 8

I'm also just learning, and I'm using reliablesite.net for my asp.net projects. They have a coupon section that is real easy to overlook, will give you 80% off your first bill - so I signed up for a quarterly cost of around $30, just paying $6 for my first 3 months. Take a look, I think they may right up your alley.

As for discountasp.net, yeah, they are good, but the surcharge for MSSQL alone puts the cost around $20 a month to start, and then you are restricted to quarterly or annually bills - no monthly. Basically, $60 up front.

Edit: One of the major features that got me to sign on to this host, even after looking at tons of others, was the dedicated application pools. Wasn't something I saw everyone offering.

Answer 9

I haven't personally used F#, so I can't speak to that.

I like MochaHost. Some people have said that they have problems with them, but I have not run into any. Unlimited space and bandwidth (meaning that as long as you aren't impacting other users), unlimited domains,and they are IIS7 on Server 2008 with the 3.5 Framework. Those are for the "Mocha" level. You get a discount, depending on how long you prepay. If you go monthly, it is $12.95. A year puts it at $10.79/mo. You should be able to get by with the "Business" hosting, which is in your price range - even if going month to month.

You also have Parallels Plesk for managing your domain(s), which is a very nice plus. For kicking around personal projects, it should be fine. Anything more than that, though, and I would look at a virtualized option. Ultimately, you get what you pay for.

Answer 10

Tip: if you land on a nice provider, but which for some reason doesn't have ASP.NET MVC installed yet, you can still use MVC by deploying it yourself.

Answer 11

You can also try CrystalTech (recommended from the ALT.NET Yahoo group). Their intermediate plan is $16.95 per month with SQL Server or their Value plan is $7.95 per month with MySQL.

Also recommended by the same group (but for personal/low usage projects only) is MochaHost (same in the answer from joseph.ferris). Their Business plan lists at $4.95 per month.

Answer 12

I second ReliableSite.Net

It is cheap and good. They even throw a free MS SQL 2005 database(1 GB- Extra DB costs $1) what other places charge $10/Month and give you less then 500MB of space.

I find Reliable does not nickle and dim you for every single thing and gives reasonable prices and have great coupons.

Like this coupon for 15% off for life: "aspforum"

Answer 13

I third ReliableSite.Net. Running a box at home would cost you more in power costs than a cheap shared hosting account.

Answer 14

Take a look at this article - http://www.ec2studio.com/articles/Hosting.html We had exactly the same problem (temporary hosting for ASP.NET) and we selected EC2.