Best ASP.NET Web Hosting

UPDATE 2011-10-10: While I think ORCS is a good company - I'm not sure of the value of their shared hosting plan anymore. I've since moved  to *nix for development and hosting, and am now happily ensconced on a Linux VPS hosted at Rackspace.

Trying to find a good ASP.NET web hosting company that represents the balance I need between cost and features turned out to be harder than I thought.

I recently signed up with Discount ASP.Net – and you know what – for just ten dollars a month – they offer excellent value for money, great support, a good in-house control panel and good bandwidth. They’ve kept their setup very simple and standard – with just one type of account (Computer security design principle number three – assurance vs. complexity).

On a single account, you have one root site – one domain and as many additional domains pointing to that ‘same’ root content as you like. You cannot point domain names to subdirectories – so you’ll need to re-write yourself if you want another domain name pointing to different content.

But then I discovered their ‘standard’ application pool recycle settings, which are: 1) You are idle for twenty minutes, 2) the worker process exceeds a 200MB working set, or 3) CPU utilization exceeds 70% for more than 3 minutes. To be honest these are all more than adequate for a single site, blog, or the standard five page company website. But dasBlog is a little memory hungry, and with two blogs and a photo gallery – my app pool was doing flip-flops many times a day.

So I searched and searched – and was generally unimpressed with the list of hosting companies ranked by some of the reviews. Sites were either unprofessional – or there was enough mixed reviews to put me off. Others were just too vague about what was in the package and others were not on W2K8/IIS7 yet (and I need IIS7).

So it came down to ORCS Web Hosting who are in a Peak 10 data centre – and Server Intellect – who are in a data centre located in the the Infomart Hotel in Dallas – now a part of DCI Technology Holdings.

Server Intellect truly impressed me with their pre-sales support and they were super keen to get the business (even if it was just me). And their Tier 2 plan allows for multiple wwwroot directories and domain names – which is sweet. However not yet having a shared plan on W2K8/IIS7, combined with a personal recommendation for ORCS Web Hosting from this guy, swung me towards ORCS Web.

ORCS Web Platinum Shared Hosting is not that different from the Discount ASP.Net setup in so far as you get a single root site and unlimited additional domain and mail aliases, but that’s where the similarities end. The app pool has no idle time limit, no CPU limit, and an 800MB working set threshold. Data transfer allowance is 100 GB/month – and the site is in a data centre with fat pipes from…

...multiple Tier-1 Internet carriers with multiple fully-lit OCx connections.

…served in part by Level 3 Communications.

So that’s where I am now… although – it was a bumpy start. ORCS appear to have built, or had built, a new control panel which was err… buggy. Support was fine though and we got the wrinkles ironed out.

So ORCS Web hosting is my new home in cyberspace for the moment; nice view, plenty of room, and fast  - will be here until the clouds come along :-)