ASP Hosting - Everything You Need To Know In One Easy Lesson

Saturday, 05 December 2009

If you've spent some time playing around with web pages and web design, you may have come across the term ASP, and wondered what it meant.  ASP stands for Active Server Pages, and it's a way for web designers to create interactive elements on their sites - things like blogs, forms, calendars, polls, hit counters, site based search engines, and so on.  You come across an ASP page every time you see the extension .asp, instead of .htm or .html.

Advantage of ASP

The great advantage of ASP is that pages designed that way look the way you want them to look, no matter what browser the visitor is using.  This is a great advance over pages scripted with HTML, which can vary wildly depending on how the site visitor is viewing them.

For this reason, you need to ensure that your hosting company can accept ASP websites - some companies just don't have the servers to run ASP scripts.  If you're looking for hosting, check the company's policies and FAQs to see if they specifically mention ASP.  Dig deep, and don't be afraid to phone them or email them to ask the question.  You need to be absolutely certain that they run it, otherwise your lovingly crafted ASP elements simply won't work.

ASP, being a Microsoft innovation, generally works best on Windows, so if you want to experiment with ASP on your site, you'll need to install an ASP server such as Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) or Microsoft’s Personal Web Server (PWS).  These are generally included as part of your Windows package, although you may need to add it via your software CD-ROM or control panel, as sometimes it's not included as part of the basic install.

If you haven't got a Windows based PC, Sun Microsystems has a program called Chili!Soft ASP that allows non-Windows servers and operating systems, such as Apache or Linux, to run ASP scripts.

If you can write scripts in HTML you can write them in ASP.  The main difference is that tags are <% and %>, rather than < and >.  As with just about everything else in the scripting and design world, you're spoilt for choice when it comes to software tools, which can be found all over the web, and often for free.

So, if you're looking to get your visitors really engaged with your website, you need to get to grips with ASP.  Make ASP hosting one of the things you look for when you shop around for web hosting.