What you should know about ASP Hosting

ASP is a server side scripting system from Microsoft Corporation. ASP is the abbreviation for Active Server Pages. You can use ASP to create very interactive and attractive web pages. In order to take proper advantage of ASP hosting services you would be required to avail special purpose ASP hosting services. On the flip side, ASP is a Microsoft proprietary solution and therefore it can only be run on Microsoft Server Solutions, which are a bit expensive hosting solutions.

The principle behind ASP hosting is rather simple. The visitor to the web page does so using his web browser. The web browser sends a request to the web server which processes the request. In case of ASP since it is a server side programming system, the server where web hosting is done executes the ASP scripts, encapsulates the results in HTML and sends it back to the browser of visitor. Even though there is not a lot of Microsoft technology required on the client side ASP works better on the Trident engine.

The recognition of ASP hosting scripts is done using the file name extension as well as some tags. In case of an ASP script in a complete file the file extension is not html it is ASP. Since this is done on server side only, the ability of your web server to interpret ASP scripts is the be all and end all of your website being sent correctly to the user's computer. Absence of ASP support in the server would mean that either the pages would not load properly or they might not at all in some cases.

This is not all however. You have to make sure that proper scripting host is available. In case of ASP hosting you can not rely on the cases where Perl and CGI are running. These are different things and therefore merely the ability to run Perl and CGI scripts is not enough for you to believe that ASP would also function the same manner. If you want to know the support for ASP from your web hosting company, you should check the documentation or better still ask them outright.

In order to be able to do anything with ASP hosting you would require the ASP server. You can download and install the ASP server from the official website of Microsoft Corporation. The best option for you is Microsoft's own web server solution namely the Microsoft IIS of the Microsoft Internet Information Services. In case you are not running a server solution and do not want big web site either Microsoft's Personal Web Server is included in Windows for your usage.

Please note that in some cases, these server solutions are not included in the installation of your computer system directly. In this case you would be required to install them afterwards. In case you are running Windows XP Home Edition or Windows ME, you would have to upgrade as these are client operating systems with restricted functionality. They can not act as ASP hosting server. It is better to go for a Server solution.

While quirky, there is support for ASP hosting in non Microsoft operating systems. This is achieved using Chillisoft ASP. The solution adds ASP ability to a number of free and non free but non Microsoft web server solutions like Apache and Red Hat Secure Server. This allows you to host an ASP server on a non MS operating system like Solaris, GNU/Linux and AIX.

In fact in order to make ASP enabled web pages, you would be required to use an ASP hosting supporting server. This is because you can not check if the scripts you have coded are working properly or not, without having a server that supports ASP installed on your development machine.

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