By Jonathan Baldwin
Microsoft is King. Certainly in the PC market, Microsoft has dominated and defeated most competition. Only in recent years, thanks to a savvy marketing department and the abysmal marketing of Vista, Apple began to make ground against Microsoft. The only other competitors are from the Unix variety.
And this is where the split in web hosting occurs. The majority of web hosting services tend to be Linux, due to the lower cost, and added security of using that operating system. However, Microsoft, being as it is, had developed proprietary software that cannot be run “as is” on Linux based systems. The most prominent of these being Active Server Pages (ASP).
Today, perhaps the majority of webmasters will agree that JSP exceeds ASP, however since Microsoft has already gotten many webmasters to use ASP, not all of them are willing to make the switch. Hence, the web hosting provider’’s quandry. In order to grab this large market of potential customers, web hosts have only two choices. Either to install a Virtual Private Server with Chilisoft ASP, or buy a windows server for those customers.
The first option, installing a Virtual Private Server with Chilisoft can be expensive, Chilisoft seem to no longer be for sale, having once gone for nearly $500. Now Sun as of June 2007 is no longer even offering Chilisoft ASP for sale, requiring perhaps that you buy one of their servers (usually in excess of $1,500) though private deals with web hosting companies might be possible.
In the event a company somehow does manage to get Chilisoft ASP onto one of their servers, the VPS cannot support both Chilisoft and Cold Fusion, which may exclude some users from it.
The second option may be more practical: simply buy a windows server. However the process of managing dedicated servers or shared hosting servers can be quite drastically different on a Windows versus Linux based system. This usually means hiring a new employee to manage the new responsibilities that entails.
In the end, the web hosting company will have to decide: will the profits from the new ASP users exceed the potential costs of installing chilisoft or managing a windows server? Will those costs be passed onto users? Will that make the web hosting service no longer competitive with cheap web hosting services” prices?
With the potential need to hire new employees to manage the windows systems, or added expenses from chilisoft, which will already increase the burden on one of your Linux systems, it would be a difficult choice. The web hosting service will have to decide what the potential gains in customers could be from making that leap to supporting ASP, and whether that outweighs the significant costs.
About The Author
Jonathan Baldwin runs a web hosting reviews website, where you can find this article, To ASP or Not to ASP, and reviews of ASP web hosting services.
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