In this article I will walk through the process of setting up an ASP.NET web application on a shared ASPHostPortal Windows server.
I will mainly walk through a typical ASP.NET or .NET MVC deployment using shared hosting on ASPHostPortal. For me, it is very easy to use Windows hosting environment to publish ASP.NET Core application.
And as someone who has spent a considerable amount of time working on .NET technologies on shared hosting environments, I know how confusing that process can be often times.
With that, let’s get started.
Choose Your Windows ASP.NET Hosting Plan
ASPHostPortal offers 4 basic ASP.NET shared hosting plan when it comes to Windows hosting. The cheapest option is always the most appealing to most people, but in this case the Host One option gives you exponentially more features and the Host Three package might be the best bang for your buck.
The main difference being that the Host Intro package only allows you up to 1 website on the server, while the Host One or above package allows you unlimited websites. Plus Host One or above comes with MSSQL database and MySQL databases.
My recommendation is please just start from at least Host One or Host Two plan. If next time, you need additional resources, you can upgrade it easily via their portal. There will be no downtime during an upgrade. Whichever plan you pick however, you will be given access to the Plesk control panel for your site management and database management needs.
Plesk Control Panel
Plesk is a leading server management platform and control panel that can run on various servers, offers an extensive list of extensions and comes with a built in WordPress toolkit, if you are looking for a quick plug and play site solution.
Essentially it is software that handles managing your VPS and your websites through its own online interface.
And it is the software that ASPHostPortal uses to manage your Windows hosted websites.
From my experience with Plesk, it is overall a decent tool to manage website configurations and even background tasks, such as database backup automation.
The interface isn’t the most futuristic or advanced on the planet and it does have a slight learning curve associated with it. However, aside from setting up a new website, there isn’t a daily need for the panel in any way.
You can do most things that you can accomplish with IIS through the Plesk panel.
Add your domain
Once you have signed up for a Windows hosting account, it is time to create your website on the Plesk panel. Please be advised that you will receive an activation email from ASPHostPortal team and it contains brief information about your hosting account
The “Plesk Admin” option will launch your server panel on a separate window.
The first thing that you’ll want to do is to add your domain (regardless of where you registered it) to the panel. At the very top of your Plesk page you should see the following options. Click on “Add Domain” to continue.
On the following domain entry form you only need to fill out the domain name that you wish to use and the directory that you will use for your websites files.
You can typically leave these blank as the defaults are the most common use case scenario.
Remember this is not a domain purchasing form. This assumes that you have already registered your desired domain and have access to the DNS records. If you haven’t registered any domain name, you can always register it with ASPHostPortal once your hosting account has been activated.
Publish your web application
There are multiple different ways to publish and deploy an ASP.NET web application. You can precompile the entire web project, in which case each page of your website will receive it’s own DLL file with a uniquely generated name on each build.
Or you can precompile with update, in which case you won’t have to rebuild your application in order to make changes to any front-end code. However you will still need to recompile for server-side code changes.
Start by right-clicking on your desired application and selecting the “Publish” option.
You have a few more options when it comes to where you want to publish your application.
Once you select a directory path and click next, you should now see the FolderProfile form.
You can either publish your Debug configuration or your Release configuration. Make sure that the precompile option is selected. The Configure link to the right of the precompilation checkmark will take you to the following form:
Depending on how you want to deploy your site, you have various options here and I don’t have any particular recommendations. Once you have saved your publish profile, you can now click on “Publish” and after some waiting time you should see your output directory ready to be transferred to your ASPHostPortal server.
Create your databases
In order to create your databases with GoDaddy you will have to go through the Plesk panel interface mentioned above.
Locate your website from the main Plesk page and you should see the following menu option:
Clicking on the “Add Database”button will take you to the database entry form to fill out. This is where you will give your database a name and where you will select the type of database that you wish to create.
ASPHostPortal Windows hosting allows you to choose from either MS SQL or MySQL database.
Recall that based on your selected package you might have limitations in database creation. The Host One package for example only allows you to create up to 2 SQL Server databases and 4 MySQL databases. While the Host Two and Host Three plan allows you to create more MSSQL databases and MySQL databases. .
You will also have the option of creating a user account for each particular database. It is typically always best practice to give anyone that is going to be working with your database their own unique user accounts configured to their roles.
This also makes it simpler later on to remove users who are no longer working on your application without causing any issues to other users.
Once you have created your database, you can now log in to the remote database in the same manner as how you would connect to any database that you have worked on.
FTP
While you are not necessarily required to create an FTP account for your websites, as you can manage your files directly through Plesk, it is typically much faster and a much more streamlined process to do so through FTP.
You can also benefit from added security, as you can create separate FTP accounts for each person working on your application and then later on simply revoke access when needed.
Locate your website once again in the Plesk panel and click on the “FTP Access” link shown below.
If you are going to have multiple people work on your web applications, it definitely makes sense to create different accounts. In this way, when someone leaves the project for any reason, you can easily invalidate that single FTP account without affecting anybody else’s work.
Note you will need some form of FTP software. You have many options when it comes FTP clients. Though the most popular one you will find is FileZilla.
Set up your DNS
If you purchased your domain through ASPHostPortal then you won’t have to do anything extra in this step.
If you purchased your domain through another 3rd party domain seller such as Google Domains however, then you will need to update your DNS records accordingly.
Configure your SSL certificate
You have a few options when it comes to setting up an SSL certificate with ASPHostPortal. You can either purchase an SSL cert through a 3rd party vendor, purchase one directly through ASPHostPortal, or you can set up a free SSL certificate.
For free SSL certificate, you can use Let’s Encrypt and you can install it directly via Plesk control panel. Here is quick guidelines how to setup Let’s Encrypt certificate on ASPHostPortal.
Configure web.config
There is one last step to take in order to get your website up and running.
You will need to make one addition to your production web.config file.
Add the following directive under the <system.web> tag in your web.config.
<trust level="Full" />Save and reupload to your server and your ASP.NET website should now be live.
Final Verdict
Regardless of the framework or even the programming language, publishing a website to a production server involves intimate knowledge of the hosting environment.
This is particularly useful when things go wrong and require quick action to fix. If you followed these steps and now have a live website running on a shared hosting server, then congrats are in order.
