ASP.NET is a web application framework developed by Microsoft to build interactive Web sites easily and productively. ASP.NET supports multiple .NET languages, such as VB.NET, C#, and JScript.NET and etc, which gives developers the flexibility in the choice of coding languages. It now is powering the web site like MySpace.com, Dell.com, Monster.com and more.

ASP.NET hosting should be able to offer enough features to smoothly run ASP.NET web sites. To find the Best ASP.NET hosting, besides some basic hosting features, you should also look at bellow items which are highly related to ASP.NET.

Windows Server Edition

We recommend Windows Server 2008, which comes with IIS7.0/7.5 to better support ASP.NET managed pipeline. Besides this, with IIS7.0 or above, you can rewrite URL without any performance lost (IIS6.0 doesn’t support URL Rewrite well, it’s not just un-friendly, but also causing performance issue).

ASP.NET framework

Each ASP.NET website has to run in corresponding .NET framework. It would be great that the web server is installed with the latest ASP.NET frameworks including 4.0/3.5 SP1 and the version required by your ASP.NET application, by which you can avoid compatible issues and still have the possibility to upgrade to the higher version.

ASP.NET Trust Level

ASP.NET trust level in IIS will directly determine whether an ASP.Net website could run successfully in a web server. The ideal level is FULL Trust, with which you won’t have any problems unless your application accesses the system information. High Trust Level and Medium Trust Level still work well in most cases. But try to avoid an ASP.NET hosting at Low Trust or Minimal Trust as they restrict the websites seriously and your application even could not call the service out of process, such as database, network, etc.

ASP.NET MVC Support

If you build your application by leveraging ASP.NET MVC, then you should check whether it’s supported by your web servers. ASP.NET MVC 3 is integrated in .NET framework 4.0, but for v1 and v2, they are required for the installation manually. As ASP.NET MVC is widely used in asp.net developer community now, we tend to recommend asp.net hosting with this feature included.

Database

Even ASP.NET works well with MySQL or other non-microsoft database, we still suggest to use database from Microsoft. SQL Server 2008 is preferred, but MS SQL Server 2008 Express edition is still a good option for a site which is not very busy.