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Intro to ASP Hosting
ASP Hosting Explained
ASP, which stands for
Active Server Pages, is a technology that uses what's called
"server-side scripting" to allow you to create imaginative, interactive
web pages. ASP hosting make it possible for your website to appear just
as you intend it to appear on any visitor's computer regardless of the
browser they are using. HTML, unfortunately, does not provide you that
same sort of certainty.
When your browser
requests any web page with the extension .asp at the end instead of the
more familiar .htm, the asp web hosting company's server knows to
interpret all asp scripts right then and there, prior to sending any
HTML information to your browser.
This makes the ASP
hosting company's server crucial to you (and your site visitors) being
able to view the web pages properly. To use asp scripting on your own
website, you would need to make sure the host you select is an ASP web
hosting company, meaning they support ASP scripting. Otherwise, you
simply can't use ASP on your site.
And keep in mind, just
because your host runs CGI and Pearl scripts, for example, it's no
guarantee that they also provide ASP hosting. To check whether your web
host is indeed an ASP hosting company, check their FAQ for information
on ASP hosting. If you find none, then email or call them to find out.
As ASP hosting was
introduced to the world by Microsoft, it typically works best on Windows
computers, particularly those running newer versions of the Windows
operating system. Before you can experiment with using ASP on any of
your web pages, you must first download and install an ASP server on
your system, such as the more prominent one - Microsoft's Internet
Information Services (IIS). Fortunately, this server or Microsoft
Personal Web Server (PWS) comes free as part of the Windows package.
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.
Sadly, 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,
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.
Taken from
Hosting Review
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