Disclaimer: I have browsed http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/asp.net+hosting and didn’t find anything quite similar in value to Dreamhost.

One of the biggest impediments IMHO for developing web applications on asp.net is the cost of deployment. I am not talking about building sites like Stackoverflow.com or plentyoffish.com. This is about sites that are bigger than brochureware and smaller than ones that require dedicated servers.

Let me give you an example.

xmec.org is an asp.net site I maintain for my college alumni. On an average it’s slated to hit around 1000-1100 views per day.
At present it’s hosted on godaddy. The service is so damn pathetic; I am using it only because of the lack of options. The site doesn’t scale (no, it’s not the code) and the web control panels are extremely slow. The money I pay doesn’t justify the service or the performance. Every deployment push is a visit to the infuriating web control panel to set the permissions and the root directories.

Had I developed it in python, this would have been deployed on Dreamhost.com with

• $10/year hosting fees (they have offers running all throughout)
• 50 GB space
• 5 MySQL Databases
• Shell / FTP Users
• POP / SMTP Access
• Unlimited Domains hosting
• Unlimited Sub domains hosting
• Unlimited Domains
• Forwarded/Mirrored
• Custom DNS
  (These are the only ones I could think of. More at the feature page)

With a dream host shell, I even have a svn checked-out version of wordpress for my blog. Now, that’s control!

To my question:
Is there any asp.net (preferably .net 3.5. Dreamhost keeps on updating versions every fortnight) hosting company providing remotely similar feature-sets and pricing like Dreamhost.

My requirements are:

• Less than $15-25/ year
• Typical WISP minus PHP
• .net 3.5 SP1
• Full Trust mode(I can live with medium trust, if not for the IL emitting libraries)
• Isolated Application Pool
• 5 – 10 MySQL db’s
• Unlimited domain hosting
• MsSql 2005 or 2008
• FTP support
• At Least 5 GB space
• SMTP
• IIS 7
• Log files Accessibility
• Moderately good control panel
• Scripting, shell support
• Nominal bandwidth

Another case in point:

Recently I’ve been contemplating building a tool-website to find duplicates and weird characters in my Google contacts and fix them.
With asp.net, the best part is that I can do this with LINQ to XML in less than 100 lines of code.
What’s bad is the hosting part. I don’t think I stand to make any money out of this and therefore can’t afford to host it on GoGrid or DiscountAsp.net. Godaddy is not an option either.

If I do this in python, I can push to this my existing $10 Dreamhost account with another domain pointed. No extra cost. Svn exported with scripts (capability) to change the connection string!

Looking at the problem holistically, I think I represent a large breed of programmers playing it cheap and experimenting different things on a regular basis, one of which will become the next twitter/digg.