So, having some experience (granted not very extensive) with ASP.NET hosting I’d like to share few thoughts with anyone who stumbles across my site. So far I dealt with GlobalHosting and Ultima Hosts (the latter is where my site is hosted as of Jan 2008) and must say that neither of the companies lived up to expectations. If GlobalHosting was just plain unprofessional and useless, it seemed that Ultima was much better, well at first sight. Now, after being with them for almost a year or so I must say that the quality of support, responsiveness and general attitude is quite mediocre. I should note that I do not host anything big on a dedicated hardware or virtual servers. I use theirs shared hosting and pay $25 a month. I guess I am like a lot of other people who just want to get out there and have few pet projects running and available on the net. Don’t want to host that stuff at home and worry about uptime, dynamic IP issues, etc.
So far the issues I have been experiencing with Ultima include poor response time, degrading performance of hosted applications, loss of data caused by issues at the hosting company (and they don’t try to do backups or anything like that). I host three sites - two ASP.NET applications and WordPress, which is PHP (and powers this blog). I noticed that the performance of the ASP.NET sites were degrading and I started inquiring into the reasons for that and eventually I was told that support moved my applications into a different application pool. Interesting fact, if you ask me. My applications are pretty low load and quite simple, so it wasn’t like the hardware was incapable of managing the load - looks like the company has crappy and very limited applications pools for losers like me who only can afford to pay $25 a month, and then better pools for others. So, anyway, they ‘moved’ my apps to different pools. The apps started to behave better, but the PHP app is still unbelievably slow - I think you noticed the fact that it takes forever to open pages on this site, didn’t you? And when I hosted a PHP solution at a different company, you wouldn’t even notice the slow down - pages were popping up with no delays at all. Makes me feel like I’m back in 1995 with my 2,400 bit modem and not using 5Mb/sec connection so many years later.
So, next issue - data loss. That happened to my blog. Apparently the company had some data corruption issues and all the MySQL data was lost. They do not keep any backups. Why would they? The $25 a month do not justify dedicating some 10Mb on their hard drives for backups of my lousy blog database. They do not notify customers about the issues either - I discovered the issue myself days after the problem occured, then waited for about a week for their response to my requests and didn’t get any.. Then I started spaming them with e-mails requesting any information and only then got short and sweet “our MySQL database was corrupted”.. Then they finally offered me to move the database and reported that everything was great and dandy just to let me discover myself that the restored database was empty, and then, few days later, the support was kind enough to tell me that my database is lost. No ’sorry’, no ‘we’ll try to make it up to you’, nothing… Well, can you blame them? In the end I’m just paying $25 a month…
It’s sad, if you ask me. I was quite happy to find a company that would host ASP.NET solutions and would look like a total losers. I was glad to see initial prompt response time and service. All in all I was quite happy and wasn’t thinking about moving somewhere.. But now I run into these issues and I’m quite pissed off. I hope that if you are looking for an ASP.NET hosting you will keep looking and find someone better, if it is possible. Don’t forget to let me know 
