ASP Hosting And Windows Web Hosting

When you see companies offering ASP Hosting services, this refers to a variant of Windows web hosting, based around the Active Server Pages scripting language.  Think of it as Microsoft’s early equivalent to popular open-source scripting languages like PHP.  It works with IIS and, although it has been overshadowed in prominence by ASP .NET, continues to be widely used today.

If you’re starting a site from scratch, you may want to steer clear of ASP hosting, since ASP has been largely phased out.  Now referred to as Classic ASP, it’s not likely to feature support for many modern tools and features.

ASP web hosting will be a good choice if you have an existing system that’s built around the language.  Moving it to a different platform such as .NET or PHP may not be worth the immediate costs, so staying with the existing code makes a lot of sense.

Despite its stature as a legacy scripting tool, there are still new sites built on the ASP platform.  While we personally wouldn’t recommend going the same route, the rationale behind them is quite solid.  ASP is a very easy scripting language, with a rich library of functions that allows for a shorter development time.  Its seamless interfacing with numerous (older) Microsoft technologies continues to be an attractive reason to stay with it.  Even more importantly, maintaining a server based on IIS is usually much simpler, allowing the overall costs of development and maintenance to remain low.

If you’re looking for ASP hosting, we highly recommended finding companies that specialize in Windows hosting.  Not only will support be more adept at handling IIS and ASP problems, they’ll usually carry plenty of ready-made scripts that you can integrate into your site as well.