Tag Archives: .Net

No more Hostasp.net

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After a few days of playing around with their server and having some difficulties, I decided to cancel their service. I’m new to Windows hosting since I’ve always used Linux hosting, so I’m not that all familiar with it. A lot of my questions can easily be resolved if they had a better FAQ or knowledge base section on their website.

If they had a local US number I can call, it would make getting support a bit easier and faster. I used to complain that Godaddy has phone support but it was long distance, but it’s still a US number. Besides, long distance is a thing of the past within the US since it’s pretty much a local call with most cell phone plans. I just thought it was weird that they didn’t use an 800 number.

Instead, I had to create a ticket in their system, which isn’t bad but the response time averaged over 6 hours. They also had a chat software installed on their website but being located outside the US, the hours were different and most of the time it’s offline. At that rate, I figured a few weeks before I can get settled in and it’s unreasonable. Only solution I had was to cancel the service and find one closer to home or at least easily accessible within the US.

Don’t get me wrong, the features you get for the price they are charging are great. You get an IP address, unlimited databases (MSSQL 2008 and MySQL), remote connection to the database, web deploy compatibility, and refund any time. If my comfort level and knowledge with Windows hosting environment matched with Linux, I wouldn’t need that much support. I think this company is new and has a potential of becoming better. Once I get more familiar with Windows servers, I may look at them again.

Hostasp.net first thoughts

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I’ve been looking around for a cheap host for .NET. It’s more expensive than Linux shared hosting. I didn’t want to spend too much being that I just want to play around with it to familiarize myself with the technology – so I’m not asking for much. What I do need is a plan where I can create more than 1 MSSQL database and support .NET framework version 4.

I found Hostasp.net from http://www.microsoft.com/web/Hosting/Home. This page has a large, extensive list but little feedback. I took a chance with that company for its price and features. It’s been a day and here are my first thoughts.

The company is based out of India. There’s a huge time difference so I was concerned about contacting someone via email and getting a response in a reasonable time frame. I sent a question using their ticketing system and the response took a little over 3 hours, not bad. I also found a 15% off coupon so it even made the already low price more appealing. So I figured it was worth a try. Here are my likes and dislikes based on a 24 hour period.

LIKES:

  • The deluxe hosting plan for Windows is $48 annually. This includes unlimited databases (MSSQL and MySQL), up to 5 domains hosted, a dedicated IP address, and a free domain name.
  • The set up took under an hour. I receive emails for every update on my account during the set up.
  • It supports up to .NET framework 4 (but currently have an open ticket regarding this)
  • You can request a month trial for .99 cents. You just have to submit a ticket.
  • You can request to cancel your account and get a refund, anytime.
  • The test pages I have created seem to load quick. Although I haven’t made complex pages yet, just simple ones for testing.

DISLIKES:

  • They have a phone number you can call but it’s long distance (international). There’s many different ways to provide phone support customers in the US even though a company is based elsewhere. VOIP is the number solution. They could at least use Skype to get a US number, whether 800 or any area code, and it would still be a local call since many cell phone plans include free long distance calls to and from the US.
  • There is a way to chat with someone from their website but during the day (my time) it’s usually unavailable or away.
  • The control panel is a little weird but I’ve been using cPanel and probably expect certain things or used to how things are. This might be a bias dislike.

So far I haven’t been able to test what I need to with this host. I checked out Godaddy’s plans. With any purchase of a domain from them, you can get free hosting, supported by ads. This didn’t work since the free hosting doesn’t support .NET framework version 4. So I ended up getting the low plan just to test things.

I’ll continue to play with Hostasp.net for a few more days and see if I can get it to work. We’ll see whether I keep this host or go with Godaddy.

Still looking for fast web development techniques

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I’ve been developing web sites for almost 10 years now. I’m still in search of a way to develop faster. I find myself doing things over and over again.

I use PHP as the programming language to develop the web apps with MySQL database. I started to look for different frameworks – but most use MVC and I don’t have time to learn it.

Some have suggested to do validation using MySQL. This helps a bit so I don’t have to write more PHP code to validate whether or not the record exists, foreign key constraints, etc. Plus it really is good practice to have these in place in the database layer.

Next I looked in to template engines to help with the layout of the site. It does help quite a bit but I’m still left with a lot of PHP code. I use Dreamweaver to write code and I used to use its automated code writing but I found it too messy and inefficient. Now I only use it because the FTP client is built in, has a file checkout system and in CS5 it can read included files so I have easy access to them. The error check is nice too. It catches many syntax errors right away. It can read used variables and be a part of the autocomplete feature.

I tried using existing systems like CMS or blogs (Joomla and WordPress). I figured I can create add-ons on top of an existing system. Joomla uses the MVC framework. WordPress on the other hand is easier to figure out how to build on top of it. Plus their documentation is really easy to follow. One of the limitations I found is the lack of access levels. Another is the pre-existing environment may not fit with a project since it’s so customized – better to be built from the ground up.

I’ve been peeking into the .NET framework off and on. I don’t primarily use Windows at all. I’m mostly on a Mac or using some sort of Linux flavor. I do have Windows7 running virtually on my MBP and iMac so I can play with it. I have played with Visual Studio and it felt easy to use plus it seemed to make developing quick. The drawbacks I’ve found are Windows hosting is more expensive than Linux hosting, IDEs are expensive and run mostly on Windows OS, and I don’t like creating online applications that can potentially only work with Internet Explorer (does not support web standards and only available on Windows OS).

Rails looks promising with the DRY (don’t repeat yourself) approach. I’ve tried to look into it and even bought some books and watched some screencasts. It’s a great language but I can’t seem to understand how to authenticate/authorize different users. They have many different plugins that I can use but each one uses their own way of doing it.

I guess I’ll keep looking. Either I’ll find time to learn MVC framework, get better at Rails, or someone will develop a new platform to speed up web development.

Started playing with .Net

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I’ve tried in the past to get .Net installed on one of my PCs. I always got errors after the install and just gave up. It’s only to get familiar with it. I usually have a Linux box as a web server anyway and we’re still using classic ASP at work. But as more projects come my way at work, I found using PHP to create different things that classic ASP can’t do. It’s not recommended but it’s a quick fix since many of the projects need to be finished ASAP. All of the sites we develop at work is written using ASP 3.0. But things like handling emails, exporting records to Excel, and uploading files can be created with more features using PHP. The transition between an ASP to PHP page isn’t something that you should do but was necessary for us to complete the project in time.

Why don’t we just develop in PHP or .Net? Well there’s a couple of reasons for that.

  • Majority of our servers are Windows. In the beginning, the IT department wouldn’t support anything but Windows servers. But since they don’t support us anyway, and we do our own support, we can use pretty much any server OS we want. We do have 3 OS X servers that can run Apache.
  • It would take a longer time to re-code already working web sites running ASP and MSSQL Server 2000 to PHP5 and MySQL or .Net. Not only do we have to re-code them, the testing would take just as long. We have to ensure that the sites work on both Windows and OS X platform and their supported browsers. It pisses me off so much going to a site that doesn’t work on the browser I use. So I make sure it doesn’t happen to any of the visitors going to the sites I develop.
  • No money to purchase new Windows hardware/software. Although, our current Windows servers are running fine, if we were to start using .Net, it would be best to run it using the Windows Server 2003 and more hard drive space. We currently are running Windows 2000 Server and MSSQL Server 2000.

So I started to play with .Net again. Luckily we got our hands on Parallels for our iMacs. We can now test on different OS and server environments. I finally got to install .Net 2.0. I know there’s 3.0 and 3.5 releasing in the near future. But I want to do baby steps. So far I have been impressed. I have been having trouble converting a site from ASP to .Net. Particularly with the user authentication. I still have to figure out how the login page will query the database.

For now, I may just try to convert features I wrote on PHP to .Net and add them to the existing ASP sites so that the transition between the pages will be smoother, less of a security risk, and easier to manage.