Top ASP Web Hosts

What is ASP?

ASP is an acronym for Active Service Page, which is simply an HTML page with embedded scripts that are processed by an application stored on the web server. ASP is one of the latest forms of server-side scripting that allows programmers to write software that accepts input from a web user through an HTML page, processes that input (usually accessing data from a server database), and then dynamically creating result HTML pages for the user.

Even though the script for an ASP page can be written in VB or Java, the files are saved as ".asp" files, which means that the Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) should be configured with the ASP feature. Hosts that haven't added the ASP feature to IIS will not be capable of running ".asp" pages.

The top ASP web hosts listed below are hosts that are not only configured to support ASP, but are also ranked highly by customers across the internet, and provide the widest range of functionality and support.

Ten of the Top ASP Web Hosts

One of the most popular magazines within the ASP programming industry is ASPnet PRO. Every year, this magazine conducts a "Readers' Choice Awards within many different categories, including code editor, content management system, forum application, and hosting service. The web hosts below were selected by ASPnet PRO as the top three ASP web hosts within the industry, a very honorable distinction.

Honorable Mention: CWS Hosting

Corporate Web Services (CWS) is a web hosting and programming company based in Rochester, MN. On the web hosting side they area very flexible company, offering hosting plans for either Linux or Windows based servers. They even offer dedicated servers, and even "co-location", meaning CWS hosts and maintains all of a company's servers and handles monitoring, security, and battery backup protection.

The hosting plans are comprehensive, including not only ASP and ASP.NET support, but they also support scripts written in PHP, SSI, CGI, and Perl. The higher priced plans also offer additional features such as a shopping cart and other 3rd party software to run a commercial retail website. Linux hosting offers even more features such as a free guestbook, counter, search engine, blog, shopping cart, and forum. The basic plan provides 75MB of storage with 4GB per month in bandwidth. The silver plan offers 100MB of storage with 6GB transfer capacity, and the gold plan offers a 150MB storage plan with 8GB per month of data transfer.

Runner-Up: CrystalTech Web Hosting

CrystalTech is primarily a hosting company, and like CWS, CrystalTech offers web hosting, small business hosting, and server and data storage services. For web hosting, they also offer typical shared web hosting as well as dedicated and "semi-dedicated" hosting options.

The hosting plans at CrystalTech is more flexible, with up to 4,000MB of storage space and an impressive 600GB of bandwidth. The ASP.NET hosting plans cost only about half as much as CWS plans, but offer the same features and more. Supported scripting languages include ASP.NET, Perl, PHP, as well as SQL and MySQL for database features. Several specific ASP.NET hosting plans are offered, and they include a number of great features, such as webmail, a free shopping cart, free site statistics, free site building software, and much more. It's very clear why CrystalTech made it to second place in the ASPnet Pro people's choice awards.

Winner: DiscountASP.NET

Discountasp.net won the asp.net PRO reader's choice award for "Best ASP.NET hosting" for four consecutive years, starting in 2005. The reason DiscountASP.NET won this award becomes apparent once you examine all of the features and functionality provided with their ASP Web hosting plan.

While they run short of CrystalTech with disk space of 1000MB and 80GB bandwidth, they more than make up for it with features and service. Other ASP.NET hosting features include a multitude of free ASP.NET components, web stats, an impressive email system with AJAX enabled webmail, auto responders and forwarding, and free email components. Additionally, they offer new customers three full months of service for free, just for trying their service.

The ASP.NET components that this hosting plan offers is amazing. Easily worth the cost of hosting alone, DiscountASP provides their customers with premade components that you can simply insert into your own code. Why reinvent the wheel? Components offered include ComponentOne bars and menus, Advanced Intellect components, the ASP.NET ReportView Control, and many more valuable components.

Choosing the Host that's Right for You

Just because the readers of ASPnet PRO chose a favorite ASP web host doesn't mean that this would be the perfect host for you. Every webmaster has unique needs. Some intend to run a retail website to sell products. Other website owners only intend to serve information and news to the public by creating a social community such as blogs or forums. So, depending on your requirements, carefully examine the features and benefits of each of the top hosts, and choose the one that best meets your own specific needs.