What is ASP? ASP stands for Active Server Pages. ASP is a scripting language that is widely used for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. It is a server side scripting language developed by Microsoft Corp. and primarily used with Internet Information Server (IIS), which integrates with Windows Server (such as NT or Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 server) platform. A server side script runs on the server. The code received from the browser is passed on to the ASP interpreter by the Web server. The ASP interpreter (residing on the web server) in turn runs through the script and produces the html to be delivered to the client browser.
ASP is commonly used with MS ACCESS or SQL Server. Therefore, it is imperative to ensure that both the ASP and ACESS or SQL Server are supported by your web host. It is important to know that the web host supports the most stable and recent versions, and not the beta versions. Windows 2000 Server with IIS5 is considered to be minimum required for a stable and reliable ASP web hosting.
One feature that distinguishes the normal HTML web pages from that of server side scripting web sites is the server response times. Many times you find the server response slowing down when encountered with an ASP script. This may be due to old server with insufficient processor capacity and memory. Check the server response times when hosting with an asp (or Windows based) web host. A slow response in loading pages with asp script could mean insufficient server resources. Some times, the response times might be slow due to excessive number of processes running simultaneously on the server. This is an indication of hosting more number of domain than the server could take.
The server is having sufficient hardware resources, usually a P IV 2GHz processor with at least 512 MB of RAM.
That the server supports recent versions of Windows Server (preferably Windows Server 2000 or Server 2003 + IIS 5) and MS SQL.
The server response is good when running ASP script based web sites.
Avoid using Linux platform, since Linux with Apache does not natively support ASP scripts. This may lead to future problems where you expand your web site functionality.
Technical support is available for installing and troubleshooting installation problems. You can ask the web host if he could install the script for you. Many web hosts agree for this.
Of course, reasonable monthly hosting charges.
