WinHost as hosting provider

Question

Anyone used WinHost for hosting a SQL / ASP.Net MVC solution?

It appears that they've got a pretty good thing going, but I have reservations with a couple of points, primarly their requirement that a subdomain point to a directory in your application, and how MVC will deal with that when my subdomain might be a webforms app.

Example: mydomain.com is ASP.Net MVC, but blog.mydomain.com might be BlogEngine.Net--and by their guidelines, have to be installed as a subdirectory of mydomain.com.

Edit: I hate it when I can't get my point across. Suppose I have a company web site built with MVC, and a blog run on a WebForms application. What I'm hearing/seeing/reading is that if I use a single account on WinHost, I'm going to have to give up my vanity url mycompany.com, and put everything in mycompany.com/someFolderMVC so that I can also have blog.mycompany.com in some other folder: blog.mycompany.com/someOtherFolderWebForms.

I really don't care about the blog pointing that way, but if I lose the top domain, it's awkward for customers--think about it: www.mycompany.com/mycompany/products ? So basically, what I'm seeing is that I have to use two "accounts" with WinHost--which defeats the whole point of being interested in such inexpensive hosting.

Ok, now, lest anyone think I'm on a rant: this is something I CURRENTLY DO with another hosting provider--that is, each subdomain is pointed to it's own folder, with no redirects required. Hence, I have myCompany.com, blog.myCompany.com, stuff.myCompany.com etc, all pointed at different folders, without requiring any script to do redirects, and certainly keeping my "vanity" urls... blog.myCompany.com is my blog, myCompany.com is my company site.

Answer 1

Check out 1and1.com. They have pretty good deals for windows hosting nowadays...

Answer 2

Generally speaking it's difficult (if not impossible) to run two .Net applications on the same folder level. Not to mention it's a poor practice. You'll run into conflicts with the applications web.config settings. Technically you can do it but it can make it really complicated when you're trying to define the elements and settings of both applications. Lets not forget the way IIS 7 works which is what Winhost is using to host the webservers. The root itself contains its own configuration file so that you can manage the account settings such as session timeouts, SMTP service, Authentication mode, and many other things. As for running .Net applications in subdirectories well, we haven't seen problems with that as long as you set the subdirectory as an application starting point. And the Winhost Control Panel provides such a feature.

demo.winhost.com/sites/manage.aspx support.winhost.com/KB/a635/what-is-the-application-starting-point-tool.aspx

learn.iis.net/page.aspx/150/understanding-sites-apps-and-vdirs-in-iis-7/ www.aspfree.com/c/a/ASP.NET/ASP-Net-Application/2/

In any case, separating your web application in different virtual application folders will give you the robustness and flexibility that .Net has to offer.