ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming Problem - Design - Solution

12.1. Problem

The problem described and solved here was a real problem that I faced while completing the sample site. I wanted to put the site online somewhere so that potential readers could browse it and consider whether it was worth the purchase, and so that I could show it to clients and colleagues during presentations about ASP.NET 2.0.

Not having a private dedicated server connected to the Internet available for this project, I chose to deploy the site to a typical shared web hosting service that uses servers running Windows Server 2003 and supports ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005. Most of these Microsoft-centric web hosting companies now support this platform, and several of them offer plans that cost as little as $10 per month. When evaluating hosting service companies, you need to ensure that they offer you enough disk space and bandwidth, and that you factor in the cost of SQL Server 2005 (some companies charge extra for this). Of course, your specific hosting requirements may vary according to the type of project you're working on. For high-usage sites, or large-size sites, or just sites that require high availability, you'll want dedicated servers configured as a web farm (whereby a number of servers are running the same applications and load-balancing is used to determine which server will process a specific web request). Also consider that our sample web site is 100% pure ASP.NET 2.0, with no legacy COM components, COM+ services, or Windows services: These things ...