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Possible Duplicate:
How to find web hosting that meets my requirements?

I have spent weeks trying to find information on hosting sites for my site. I currently use 1&1 but I need to have support for add-on DLLs (iTextsharp) and they have told me for security reasons they can't do that. I use .NET, C# and MSSQL.. I'm in the UK but not bothered where I host.

So off I went researching on the web, and every time I thought I had found a good one, I would read reviews and they would be bad!

I am down to the following list. Does anyone have any views on them or point me to a good site which has proper reviews from lots of users or even better a reliable .NET host which would support my needs.

DiscountASP, U2-Web, 000webHost, HeartInternet, Somee, Arvixe, Daily.co.uk, GoldPuma, TitanInternet, Aspnethosting, IXWebHosting

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Keep in mind that users are far more likely to write a review if their experience has been bad than if their experience is good. Look at the services they offer and the price. Too cheap can (and sometimes has) indicated a lack of customer support and too expensive can give you a lot of crap you don't need. Don't throw away a service because of a couple of bad reviews.

I have picked up Web Designer magazine and every month they have a four or five page rated list of all the best hosting websites and prices. That may be a nice unbiased way to choose.

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It depends upon how far you want to stretch your budget - Shared servers will always be incredibly cheap, but of course you will always trade off cheapness for many restrictions upon your code and deployment options.

Have you considered a VPS solution rather than shared hosting? I've been using UK company Memset and I've found that they are pretty good. You can get your own virtual Windows 2008 server for £11.95 per month (if you choose the year contract, they do a 1 month minimum term and you can cancel any time).

The only problem you'd have with choosing a VPS solution is MS SQL Server. Clearly the licence costs are prohibitive for an individual, but if it's a greenfield project, installing PostgreSQL or MySQL is trivial, so perhaps you could develop against that. I've been using the PostgreSQL ADO.NET libs for years and they are really good - you shouldn't have any problems.

If you decide to try a VPS - use the Web Platform Installer to set things up. It's really smooth, quick and easy.

P.S. Before anybody asks... I don't work for Memset!

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You may want to give WinHost (http://winhost.com) a look. We support everything you're looking for starting at $4.95/month. If you have any questions about us feel free to drop us a line.

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  • Removed link. Undecided whether to delete, as not a great answer to a subjective question.
    – JasonBirch
    Oct 15, 2010 at 5:06
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    I don't think I would classify this as spam. Advertising sure, but that's kinda what the op asked for. Oct 16, 2010 at 0:04
  • A valid answer, i think. I'm am here because i have the same question, and this answer helps. It would be nice if Barry pointed to some happy customer feedback or reviews about WinHost, since the OP asked for that, but it's still a good answer.
    – b w
    Nov 5, 2010 at 17:32
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Depending on your skill level you may want to check out Rackspace Cloud. I have used their apache servers and see that they have started offering windows. They are completely self managed which means you can configure them to support pretty much anything, and because they are self managed they are inexpensive. When I've had questions they were very responsive, however, they are somewhat limited in what questions they are able to answer since you build the server yourself from the ground up they don't always know how to fix every possible configuration.

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if you use a host with virtual hosting or Hyper-v hosting, then you can get full control and install whatever you want. This hosting is a bit more expensive but worth it in many cases. Shared hosting providers have very strict limitations, when you get hyper-v hosting those limitations seldom exists.. You can install whatever components, database, dlls, com objects, mail server etc that you want (and own a lic for)

it's a good approach. (and i think the best one versus the highly HYPED cloud hosting that is usually so much more expensive)

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I use godaddy's basic hosting service, and use 3rd party assemblies fine, but it shouldn't be unique to them... You don't have to install the 3rd party dll globally. They can go in your bin folder and accessible to your webapp.

Admittedly, I haven't used iTextSharp before so its possible there's something about it that requires more than that.