Brett Slaski

	Posted On: 29 Apr 2009 10:50 AM
Greetings, I just wanted to check to see if there is an ETA on any IIS7 installations for shared hosting? Thank you, Brett

Their response, unfortunately:

Clint Schleeper

	Posted On: 29 Apr 2009 02:06 PM
Hi Brett, At this time we have no plans for incorporating IIS7 into our shared hosting environment. IHOST, LLC Customer Support https://support.ihostllc.net support@ihostllc.net Local/International: 1.440.793.0323 x2 Toll-free: 1.800.593.0238 x2

So now I have work to do, find a host with a like offering as iHostasp.net running IIS7, is there such an animal?  I have tried in the past and haven’t come up with anything so any suggestions is highly appreciated.

I find it ironic that I needed to send iHostasp the support ticket today, from work, out of the blue.  When I got home today, my copy of Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 arrived on the door step from Amazon.  A book I pre-ordered shortly after the release of Scott Gu’s free first chapter, now available in HTML.

Please post comments if you know of a good hosting company providing shared hosting of IIS7.

Thank you.

My current plan, which runs around $16/mo, $88.83 every 6 months.  I have to say the two things I like the best is dedicated memory pool for each domain and 3 MS SQL databases.  Three databases was the major reason I went with them in the first place.

• Dedicated application pool for each domain!
• Customer accessible database backups!
• Storage – 2400MB
• Bandwidth – 20GB
• DNN Installations – 3
• Parent portals – 60
• Child portals – Unlimited
• MSSQL 2005- 3 x 250MB each
• MySQL 4/5 – 6 x 250MB each
• Mail – Unlimited POP3/SMTP/IMAP/WEB MAIL Accounts. Accounts. MailFoundry spam & virus filtering included.
• FTP – Unlimited FTP accounts with ability to set user permissions.
• Sub domains – Create & manage your own 3rd level domains.
• Statistics – Detailed real-time statistics to track your visitors.
• ASP.NET 1.1/2.0/3.0/3.5, ASP 3.0, PHP5 supported
• Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX extensions
• Can run wide array of other ASP, PHP, .NET based web applications without any limits

Please?!

And their reply:

Hi Brett,

We do not have IIS7 available within our shared hosting environment and do not have any plans to incorporate it in the near future. However, we do offer virtual dedicated server hosting environments and we could set you up with IIS7 on a virtual dedicated server. Our virtual dedicated server packages can be viewed at the link below.

iHost Virtual Dedicated Server Hosting Packages:
http://www.ihostasp.net/HostedAppliance/Default.asp

IHOST, LLC
Customer Support
https://support.ihostllc.net
support@ihostllc.net
Local/International: 1.440.793.0323 x2
Toll-free: 1.800.593.0238 x2

UPDATE: (4/17/2010)

It was really interesting to me that the owner of iHostasp.net left a message on this blog post about their service and how it was incorrect for their technician to say what they did.  But the truth holds; it is now April 17th of 2010 and still they have no known installations of II7 in their shared hosting environment.  What if I would of took him for his word and stayed with iHost?  I would be stuck and still without the environment I need.

Trying to make good of your company is one thing, making up stories is something completely different.

** To save you time of reading through this, you can’t cleanly use MVC on iHost**

I have been playing around with ASP.NET MVC for at least six months now and was estatic when the version 1.0 released during MIX09.  

Some time around preview 3 I wanted to put one of my MVC sites out at iHostasp.net where I host all my Microsoft technology-based stuff.  I first hit a roadblock because the .NET 3.5 Framework wasn’t available for my domain.  I looked at iHost’s website and found it listed and asked, wtf?

It was a simple enough request, they just moved my domains over to one of their servers with the 3.5 framework installed.  The only issue this caused is that I lost all of my site statistics.  The moved forced me to reconfigure SmarterStats (a decent free offering from them) for the new server.  

Figured I was all set now, but no, MVC required IIS7 to work with regular routing.  Well it failed and I went over to godaddy and ran it on a free (came with domain purchase) server instance (which is horrible) for some testing, etc.  

Now I am back and documenting my findings for whatever.
First to note is that in the ASP.NET 1.0 Release Notes.doc file a reference is made to Phil Haack’s website for Bin Deploying ASP.NET MVC.  Searching for this on Phil’s site yeilds nothing, so I have linked it above.  

It’s really simple to do, just set the following references to “Copy Local”.

System.Web.Mvc
System.Web.Routing
System.Web.Abstractions 

From VS2008, locate the references section in the Solution Explorer.  Locate each of the three references (dll’s) above, right click on them, and choose properties.  From the Properies view, change Copy Local: False to Copy Local: True.

That’s it.  When you compile or publish your solution the DLL’s for those three references will be added to the bin folder.  

After all of that, it still will not work as the routing will not work correctly without hacking iis settings a bit.  Forgot about this and I had actually tried all of this already about 45 days ago.  

As stated in Using ASP.NET MVC with Different Versions of IIS there are two options available for IIS6 and below:

1. Modify your route table to use filenames (ewe)
2. Create a wildcard script map (requires access to IIS) 

So the [my] only option is to wait for an unknown amount of time until iHostasp.net decides to start ii7 installations.   Their support told me that they plan to, but have no schedule set. This is a real bummer about ASP.NET MVC, but I’ll get over it.  :)