Has anyone in the forum had any experiences with discountasp.net hosting services? This is what we are looking for:
ASP.NET 2.0 con soporte para AJAX, o ASP.NET 3.5
SQL Server 2005/2008, php
Band Width over 150GB
Hard Disk space over 1.5 Gb
Thanks in advanced.

Discountasp.net is a very big and reputed Windows hosting company and they have some very good reviews available from their existing customers. Hence, I believe you won't go wrong with them. However, it seems you are in need of more disk space/bandwidth than is allocated in their base plan and hence you should consider getting additional disk space/bandwidth addon when you sign up with them.
Good luck!
- Rick

Thanks Rick, I appreciate your help. Any other recommendations will be very helpfull.

I used them for a client project. They are definitely sharp windows/.net people, and like Rick said, they have a really good reputation. However, they charge additional for ms sql databases, and they don't offer mysql.
They seem to be a good host, but I wouldn't use them because the database situation is a deal breaker for me. I think web hosting is well beyond the point where a windows host should be charging extra for the database that is the primary reason I'd seek out a windows host in the first place, but that's just my opinion.

I used them for a client project. They are definitely sharp windows/.net people, and like Rick said, they have a really good reputation. However, they charge additional for ms sql databases, and they don't offer mysql.
They seem to be a good host, but I wouldn't use them because the database situation is a deal breaker for me. I think web hosting is well beyond the point where a windows host should be charging extra for the database that is the primary reason I'd seek out a windows host in the first place, but that's just my opinion.
Yeah the database charge is a different way to do it but if you just imagine a total price of $20 for the both then it is similar to other hosters in price and their reputation is good.
The single domain seems more irritating at Discountasp
Softsys has a good rep here and should be on your investigation list and also I am getting very good experiences at Arvixe.com
There are also others to look at in my short list thread and also scan the top 20 post in this forum will yield some to look at...

Yeah the database charge is a different way to do it but if you just imagine a total price of $20 for the both then it is similar to other hosters in price and their reputation is good.
However it comes out, they're still charging extra for something that should be an inherent part of .Net hosting. It would be different if they at least offered MySQL, but as it is, If I signed up and didn't buy MSSQL as an add-on, I'd be left with Access as my only choice. I don't have anything against Access, I still build small sites using it, but we're talking about a host who specializes in serving the Windows/.Net community.
Why not just charge more for the hosting, Windows developers expect that anyway, and remove the negative stigma of charging extra for it?
Of course, this is all just my opinion.
The single domain seems more irritating at Discountasp
Yes, then add that on top of it :)

Full disclosure, I work at DiscountASP.NET and I thought I would take a few moments and clarify why we charge for MS SQL and basically charge the slightly higher rates that we do.
We are aware that other hosts may include MS SQL for free. We offer MS SQL as an add-on so we can provide the high level MS SQL hosting service that we currently do and have a reputation for.
Is it possible for us to include MS SQL in our base plan - of course it is, but our owners have made a business decision that we do not want to make the tradeoffs associated with this type of offering.
What kind of operational tradeoffs would we need to cut for a free MS SQL offering? If everything is on the table then we could load our MS SQL servers with more databases even though performance would suffer (i.e. oversell our servers). We could also consider hosting customer MS SQL databases on the same box as customer websites to save on buying extra servers. I think customers are unaware that many hosts that do offer MS SQL for free put customer MS SQL databases on the same web servers as their customer web sites. This is done to cut costs. However, doing so causes server degradation and can lead to increased downtime for the customer. These hosts are willing to compromise the uptime of the customers by not investing money in order to give their customers the proper hosting environment. DiscountASP.NET does not do this. We place the MS SQL DB's of our customers on dedicated MS SQL servers as opposed to placing them on the same web servers where their web sites exist. We have invested the proper capital so that we can provide our customers with the proper hosting environment. Because we host customer web sites and customer MS SQL databases on separate servers, we have to purchase additional servers. This is one reason why we charge for MS SQL (please also note, for our shared hosting environment, we use the standard edition of MS SQL, where many hosts use the Workgroup edition of MS SQL so our Microsoft licensing fees are higher).
Other tradeoffs we could consider is to use cheaper servers and just take a chance with lower quality hardware (we currently use Dell Poweredge servers). We could fire our Microsoft Certified DBAs and save on salary. We would stop doing R&D work on MS SQL tools like our automated ms sql backup/restore tools and attach mdf file tools, which we have been supporting since 2006 in our custom-built ASP.NET control panel. We could stop supporting our MS SQL backup API. We could stop working with Microsoft on new MS SQL-related technology like MS SQL 2008 and the IIS7 Manager DBManager UI extension.
The other way to support a free MS SQL offering is to raise our base hosting prices for everyone and offer free MS SQL so that our customers that do not use MS SQL subsidize the customers that do use MS SQL. But this is not fair.
Other reasons why our pricing is slightly higher is because we offer two data center locations, one in the USA (Los Angeles, CA) and a second in the UK (London, England) for optimal web site speed purposes. Most, if not all, web hosts only have one data center as they are not willing or cannot financially make the investment in additional data center locations. DiscountASP.NET choose to invest in a second data center location (an investment that was well over the six figure mark) in order to give customers from all around the world more flexibility as to where they want their site hosted. The fact that we offer and manage two data center locations is another reason why we are slightly more expensive than the regular $5/mo host.
I think hosting customers should also take note of a web host's reinvestment and improvement in their hosting services. We are proud of the fact that we continually reinvest into improving our product and services, thus increasing our value offering. If you visit our news page (http://www.discountasp.net/pressrelease_news.aspx), you will see that in 2008 we had well over 30 announcements that communicated product enhancements and partnerships with other companies that increased the value of our offering. In 2009, we already have 5 announcements explaining new partnerships and service enhancements. We feel our news page communicates to our customers that we are not a host that sits back and does not improves its product. On the contrary, we feel our news page communicates that we are an active hosting company that is constantly working to improve the VALUE of our services.
Our business managers have gone through our pricing exercise and they've made a business decision that we will continue our pricing schedule as is and not make those tradeoffs listed above. Our business focus is to continue to innovate and innovation costs capital. I hope you understand where we are coming from.
If anyone has any questions regarding DiscountASP.NET, please don't hesitate to visit our web site and send us an email. Thank you.

Full disclosure, I work at DiscountASP.NET and I thought I would take a few moments and clarify why we charge for MS SQL and basically charge the slightly higher rates that we do.
We are aware that other hosts may include MS SQL for free. We offer MS SQL as an add-on so we can provide the high level MS SQL hosting service that we currently do and have a reputation for.
Is it possible for us to include MS SQL in our base plan - of course it is, but our owners have made a business decision that we do not want to make the tradeoffs associated with this type of offering.
What kind of operational tradeoffs would we need to cut for a free MS SQL offering? If everything is on the table then we could load our MS SQL servers with more databases even though performance would suffer (i.e. oversell our servers). We could also consider hosting customer MS SQL databases on the same box as customer websites to save on buying extra servers. I think customers are unaware that many hosts that do offer MS SQL for free put customer MS SQL databases on the same web servers as their customer web sites. This is done to cut costs. However, doing so causes server degradation and can lead to increased downtime for the customer. These hosts are willing to compromise the uptime of the customers by not investing money in order to give their customers the proper hosting environment. DiscountASP.NET does not do this. We place the MS SQL DB's of our customers on dedicated MS SQL servers as opposed to placing them on the same web servers where their web sites exist. We have invested the proper capital so that we can provide our customers with the proper hosting environment. Because we host customer web sites and customer MS SQL databases on separate servers, we have to purchase additional servers. This is one reason why we charge for MS SQL (please also note, for our shared hosting environment, we use the standard edition of MS SQL, where many hosts use the Workgroup edition of MS SQL so our Microsoft licensing fees are higher).
Other tradeoffs we could consider is to use cheaper servers and just take a chance with lower quality hardware (we currently use Dell Poweredge servers). We could fire our Microsoft Certified DBAs and save on salary. We would stop doing R&D work on MS SQL tools like our automated ms sql backup/restore tools and attach mdf file tools, which we have been supporting since 2006 in our custom-built ASP.NET control panel. We could stop supporting our MS SQL backup API. We could stop working with Microsoft on new MS SQL-related technology like MS SQL 2008 and the IIS7 Manager DBManager UI extension.
The other way to support a free MS SQL offering is to raise our base hosting prices for everyone and offer free MS SQL so that our customers that do not use MS SQL subsidize the customers that do use MS SQL. But this is not fair.
Other reasons why our pricing is slightly higher is because we offer two data center locations, one in the USA (Los Angeles, CA) and a second in the UK (London, England) for optimal web site speed purposes. Most, if not all, web hosts only have one data center as they are not willing or cannot financially make the investment in additional data center locations. DiscountASP.NET choose to invest in a second data center location (an investment that was well over the six figure mark) in order to give customers from all around the world more flexibility as to where they want their site hosted. The fact that we offer and manage two data center locations is another reason why we are slightly more expensive than the regular $5/mo host.
I think hosting customers should also take note of a web host's reinvestment and improvement in their hosting services. We are proud of the fact that we continually reinvest into improving our product and services, thus increasing our value offering. If you visit our news page (http://www.discountasp.net/pressrelease_news.aspx), you will see that in 2008 we had well over 30 announcements that communicated product enhancements and partnerships with other companies that increased the value of our offering. In 2009, we already have 5 announcements explaining new partnerships and service enhancements. We feel our news page communicates to our customers that we are not a host that sits back and does not improves its product. On the contrary, we feel our news page communicates that we are an active hosting company that is constantly working to improve the VALUE of our services.
Our business managers have gone through our pricing exercise and they've made a business decision that we will continue our pricing schedule as is and not make those tradeoffs listed above. Our business focus is to continue to innovate and innovation costs capital. I hope you understand where we are coming from.
If anyone has any questions regarding DiscountASP.NET, please don't hesitate to visit our web site and send us an email. Thank you.
Thanks for the detailed info.
But as I said the cost of your SQL Server added to the hosting package is not out of line with the competition and DiscountASP has a good reputation.
You could have a "gold" type package that includes it and then the original comment would be moot but nothing would be any different so you might want to consider that maybe some percentage of potential customers view your marketing approach in some negative light. Beats me. Seems easu enough to add 10 plus 10 to get 20.
It might be worthwhile however to consider adding some more domains with the basic package?

DevTech,
Thank you for your reply. We thought about adding packages, but when surveying our customer base, like you, the majority percentage said they didn't seem to have any issues with the one plan, a la carte, pricing (if fact, the majority prefer it), as one plan is very simple.
In all honesty, we do not get a lot of requests for multi-domain hosting. Possibly because with multi-domain hosting can come the evil "overselling server" feeling. I'll pass this information on to our product team. They keep track of customer and potential customer feedback.
At the end of the day, not every host can be everything to everybody. Some people aren't going to like us because of our pricing, or because we lack a certain feature, and others that are less price-sensitive and excited by our feature-set will. This is a fact of the hosting industry, no one host can meet everyone's needs.

DevTech,
Thank you for your reply. We thought about adding packages, but when surveying our customer base, like you, the majority percentage said they didn't seem to have any issues with the one plan, a la carte, pricing (if fact, the majority prefer it), as one plan is very simple.
In all honesty, we do not get a lot of requests for multi-domain hosting. Possibly because with multi-domain hosting can come the evil "overselling server" feeling. I'll pass this information on to our product team. They keep track of customer and potential customer feedback.
At the end of the day, not every host can be everything to everybody. Some people aren't going to like us because of our pricing, or because we lack a certain feature, and others that are less price-sensitive and excited by our feature-set will. This is a fact of the hosting industry, no one host can meet everyone's needs.
As a developer, I started out with 10 domains I wanted to play with and by reputation DiscountASP was the first thing I looked at. Unfortunately as near as I can tell I would have needed to purchase 10 packages and since they aren't production sites for anything, the cost seemed prohibitive...
If you made x domains included in every package where x is a constant number then it wouldn't have an overseller feel I think since you wouldn't be differentiating packages by number of domains but that's just my take on it...

In all honesty, we do not get a lot of requests for multi-domain hosting. Possibly because with multi-domain hosting can come the evil "overselling server" feeling. I'll pass this information on to our product team. They keep track of customer and potential customer feedback.
At the end of the day, not every host can be everything to everybody. Some people aren't going to like us because of our pricing, or because we lack a certain feature, and others that are less price-sensitive and excited by our feature-set will. This is a fact of the hosting industry, no one host can meet everyone's needs.
Doug, you make some very good points. Especially about every host not being everything to everybody. With discountasp.net's reputation in this industry I don't think anyone would worry about you overselling if you provided more domains on each account.
For example, suppose you allowed for 5 domains on an account. People who know what overselling is are definitely not going to worry that you're overselling, or you would just slap "unlimited" on it. I think you would be perceived as being generous.
It is a case by case basis, but in my case, most of my clients are small to medium size churches. Many of them want to have multiple domain names for different departments. While I've used you in the past for a commercial client, I have to send clients like these somewhere else.

Thank you for the feedback. I will definitely pass it on to our product management team :)

Doug,
Thanks for explaination. However, I still thinking DASP not offer free MSQL is big mistake. Why don't offer Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express version for customer using share hosting? My web site share with other 383 webs in the same server. If I need more performance, more security, I will utilize the dedicate servers plan. One for web. One server for SQL using Advanced Edition.
I guessed the other hosting provider offers Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express edition. I'm thinking moving my share hosting from DASP to that company.

Doug,
Thanks for explaination. However, I still thinking DASP not offer free MSQL is big mistake. Why don't offer Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express version for customer using share hosting? My web site share with other 383 webs in the same server. If I need more performance, more security, I will utilize the dedicate servers plan. One for web. One server for SQL using Advanced Edition.
I guessed the other hosting provider offers Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express edition. I'm thinking moving my share hosting from DASP to that company.
lol - DiscountASP is never going to offer SQL Server Express. Microsoft doesn't like that option.
And they do in fact offer free SQL Server if you just imagine the account cost is $20 per month instead of %10. So considering their reputation and if you can live with just a single domain, that price is competitive enough for many people.

I guessed the other hosting provider offers Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express edition. I'm thinking moving my share hosting from DASP to that company.
I don't know the technical details behind it, but I was told by one host that sql server 2005 express has some serious security issues in the shared hosting environment, and that any host who knew what they were doing wouldn't allow it on their servers.
Doug, any input on this?

Not so much security, but speed moreso. SQL Server Express isn't made for a hosted environment, it's made for development.

SQL Express has lot of limitations for the max amount of memory it can address and the max number of CPU that it can use. This is a severe limitation on production servers as database servers needs to be specially configured (at least we do so) by having high cpu power (Quad processor - multi core), around 8 - 16 GB RAM and 15k disks drives. The most serious limitation is the max database size limit that is setup for SQL Express. Hence, as Radic mentioned above, it should only be used for development environment and not recommended for hosted environment.
- Rick

SQL Express has lot of limitations for the max amount of memory it can address and the max number of CPU that it can use. This is a severe limitation on production servers as database servers needs to be specially configured (at least we do so) by having high cpu power (Quad processor - multi core), around 8 - 16 GB RAM and 15k disks drives. The most serious limitation is the max database size limit that is setup for SQL Express. Hence, as Radic mentioned above, it should only be used for development environment and not recommended for hosted environment.
- Rick
As I said before, if people need to host a web site that deal with a large database, dealing with money, with sensitive data like credit card, health record they will NEVER use SHARE hosting. Some developer using share hosting as prototype, personal project, dealing with small database, blogging, forum,...
If you can offer Access database, MSDE, you can offer the SQL 2K5 Express Edition. Of course, most of Microsoft Express Edition product have limited feature in compare with paid version such professional edition, advanced edition. Why Microsoft doing that? It's a marketting.
For development using SQL2K5 Express edition in SHARE hosting server that support 1GB RAM and 4GB data is a lot. That's enough. If we need more, we're going to dedicate servers, using web farm and SQL 2K5 Advanced edition with at least two nodes.

I don't know the technical details behind it, but I was told by one host that sql server 2005 express has some serious security issues in the shared hosting environment, and that any host who knew what they were doing wouldn't allow it on their servers.
Doug, any input on this?
We do not support SQL Express, nor do we have any intention to, as this product was designed as a personal database and has limitations, has security issues, and potential for high server resource usage in a shared hosting environment.
Because Microsoft strongly recommends web hosts to not support SQL Express within a shared hosting environment, you will be hard pressed to find a reputable shared host that supports SQL Express. If you read the following blog post from the Microsoft SQL team, you will see that they even state that SQL Express should not be used in a shared hosting environment: http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlexpress/archive/2008/02/22/sql-server-express-and-hosting.aspx
We do realize that there are many devlopers who will want to use their SQL Express DB in a live hosting environment. To facilitate this, we launched our very own automated Attach .MDF tool which allows developers who use SQL Express on their local machine to easily transfer their SQL Express DB to the live SQL database. We released the MDF tool in our control panel along with a suite of other SQL tools back in 2006. If you have any further questions regarding our Attach .MDF tool, then please contact us via our web site.