Search for an ASP.NET hosting provider

With technology moving at the speed of light, it is becoming increasingly difficult for developers to keep up with all the upcoming web technologies. Then there is also the question of support. Once you have developed a web application where would you deploy it? Is your web hosting provider also keeping up with new and upcoming technologies.

These questions have bothered me for long. As a Windows & ASP.NET developer I have to keep up with everything that Microsoft throws at me and then hosting that developed content is another headache that I have to deal with.

At first I went with the heavily advertised web hosting providers out there, you name it and I have tried it. The problem with these brand names is that they are very slow to adopt new technologies and even slower rolling them out to their customers. I had to wait for months and sometimes years for my provider to start supporting something like ASP.NET 4 & MSSQL 2008.

I have also very bad experiences when dealing with the support of these name brands, yes their response time is amazing but after some time you start to get the feeling that you are talking with a robot. My support tickets would take days to resolve without any sort of concrete help from these providers. Most of them do not give you any kind of personalized support and you end up being thrown around their support department.

As my domain of work involves Windows Hosting I started looking out for cheap but reliable windows hosting providers that are not just there to give you some space and then leave you out on your own. It involved purchasing hosting accounts on many small and medium sized companies and then checking out their responses for personalization and real support. My criteria also included finding only those companies who are able to keep up with new and upcoming Windows and ASP.NET technologies. That allowed me to narrow down my choices.

Finally after about 3 months of searching I found this company named HostingFest, they are medium sized Windows Hosting providers who provide one of the cheapest shared hosting packages in the planet. I signed up for their Basic Festival package on the Windows 2008 group of packages (Remember they offer both Windows 2003 & Windows 2008 packages). I choose Windows 2008 because in that group of packages they were supporting the newest technologies from Microsoft.

After being with them for around 2 months I can finally say that it is a match made in heaven. They fulfilled each one of my requirement. Their servers are fast and reliable, they are cheap. They support everything that I needed. The best part is their support. They do not have those automated bots that reply in minutes, they research your problem and come up with a solution. Almost all my tickets with them got resolved within one reply.

So my recommendation here is plain and simple go for HostingFest if you are looking for Cheap Windows Hosting. You cannot go wrong.