ASP Web Hosting Explained

• Home
• Articles
• ASP Web Hosting Explained

ASP is a technology which is often revered to server-side scripting. It stands for Active Server Pages and was developed by Microsoft to be used in conjunction with their IIS (Internet Information Services). Server-side scripting allows you create complex database driven websites, giving you the power to generate many more pages very quickly, static HTML unfortunately does not allow you to do this.

Browsers generally request pages with the .htm or .html, however when a page is requested with .asp, your web server knows that this page has to be parsed. Parsed meaning that it has to interpret the scripts on the page converting them to static HTML before sending back to the browser. For example, if you have a script that gets all the product records the server will parse this script and create the HTML to display all the products in the database. If someone adds or deletes a product, it will automatically reflect without you having to change any HTML.

Although ASP has a very large following and community base, it is not very widely adopted in the hosting world, the one main reason being that it is expensive. Not only does ASP have a license fee, you need to purchase a windows based operating system for you server. Unlike PHP, basically every single host out there supports this language, if you are looking to use ASP with your website, please make absolute certain that your host supports it.

It is best to try ASP on your system first before you go an buy a ASP supported hosting plan. ASP works best on computer running Windows. Before you start tinkering with ASP, you first need to install an ASP server on your system, the most popular one being IIS.

You may have to "Add" the program to your system through the software CD or your control panel, as it may not have been included as part of the basic install procedure. Unfortunately, Windows ME and Windows XP Home Edition do not support ASP scripting.

If you don't use a Windows operating system (or simply use a different server), ASP hosting still may be available to you. A product named Chili!Soft ASP, put out by Sun Microsystems and available at www.chilisoft.com, supports ASP on many other web servers such as Red Hat, Secure Server, and Apache, using such alternate operating systems as Linux, AIX, and Solaris.

Again, you must have IIS, PWS, Chili!Soft, or some other ASP-enabled server installed on your system in order to make ASP web pages.

ASP scripting is a language all its own, and though there are many tools online, many of them free, for aiding you in creating ASP-rich websites, you will also have to learn the basics of the language yourself. Otherwise, how could you troubleshoot the occasional, inevitable, error? Learning ASP is not hard. Rest assured, if you could learn HTML (to write all commands between "<" and ">", for example), you can learn ASP too (and put all commands now between "<%" and "%>"). See? Not that different.
Lucky for us, the web is saturated with free tools for use on ASP websites: forums, mailing lists, guest books, in-site search engines, forms, blogs, polls, hit counters, web-based email, and WhoIs searches (for looking up potential domain names).

If you're willing to take the little bit of time it requires to learn the basics of ASP scripting and you find the right ASP hosting provider, you open the doors to a boundless world of exciting possibilities to enrich the experiences of your site's visitors and keep them coming back again and again.