Does silverlight hosting requires any additional cost or special web server?

Question

If I want to host a site developed with Silverlight does it require any additional cost or special web server? Or i can just host it on my current ASP.NET hosting provider?

Answer 1

The only requirement to a server is that silverlight MIME types need to be registered:

.xap application/x-silverlight-app

.xaml application/xaml+xml

Answer 2

For Silverlight 2 or later, all you need is the .xap MIME type

.xap application/x-silverlight-app 

Answer 3

Silverlight is all executed on the client side similar to JavaScript with any server callback functionality handled exactly the same as a regular asp.net project. So the above mime type is the only thing which any hosting handling asp.net should have.

Answer 4

Whilst its highly recommended that .xap and .xaml content are served with the corresponding mime type in the Content-Type header it isn't actually a requirement from the Silverlight plugin's point of view.

However a default IIS6/7 installation won't serve .xap or .xaml files without either a specific mime mapping for these extensions or .* mapping to application/octet-stream.

There are no additional costs nor anything special needed on the server. ASP.NET is not needed either, you could just as easily serve Silverlight content using PHP via Apache on Linux.

Answer 5

Since you speciifcally mentioned cost Id thought Id direct you to this url on Silverlight Streaming. You can get a 10GB storage account and up to 5TB of data transfer per month for free...subject to change once the service comes out of beta. So depending on what you're going to accomplish with your Silverlight App this may advantageous.