Are you looking for a good Windows Server provider?
Your search is over!
Most host review sites claim that there are top 10 providers, but our experience shows that this is not true, and only a few companies provide quality services and support. On this site you will find some of the best Windows hosting companies offering quality Shared, VPS, Cloud, Dedicated, Managed, and Reseller services.
Before digging into the awesome Windows Server hosts we know and trust, an important disclosure:
Some of the links below are affiliate links, which means that if you choose to make a purchase, we’ll earn a commission. This commission comes at no additional cost to you. Please understand that we have experience with all of these ASP.NET Hosting companies, and we recommend them because they are helpful and useful, not because of the small commissions we make if you decide to buy something. Please do not spend any money on these products unless you feel you need them or that they will help you achieve your goals.
Top Providers
Turnkey Internet
TurnKey Internet provides superior performance Shared, VPS, Reseller and Dedicated Hosting plans at affordable prices. They only use genuine 100% enterprise-class servers, owned by them and hosted in their own green datacenter located in New York. Their plans now feature all new SSD disk systems, with 24+ CPU cores per server, Gigabit network speeds, and a 100% Network Uptime Guarantee. Their main features are:
- Windows Server 2019/2016
- MS SQL Server 2019/2016
- ASP.NET Core 3 / ASP.NET 4.8
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- Full Trust ASP.NET
- FREE Website & Server Migrations
- 30 Day Money Back Guarantee
Liquid Web
We expected the highest standards from our web hosting provider and that’s why the BestWindowsHosting.net is powered by LiquidWeb! As one of the top companies they provide the most reliable Fully Managed Cloud, VPS, Reseller and Dedicated Hosting solutions. You could choose between self managed, core managed, and fully managed plans and receive the best support value for your dollar with their Unbeatable Technical Support. Liquid Web owns and operates three private data centers with redundant power, cooling, and network systems, which allow then to provide fast, secure, and reliable performance at all the times. If you need a Host which will manage your services, so you will have a time to grow your business, then the Liquid Web is the right choice! Their main features are:
- Windows Server 2019/2016
- MS SQL Server 2019/2016
- ASP.NET Core / ASP.NET 4.8
- Fully Managed Servers
- 100% Network Uptime Guarantee
- SSD RAID 1 Primary Drives
- Unbeatable Technical Support
Top Windows Hosting Features
- Windows Server 2019/2016
- Internet Information Services (IIS) 10
- SQL 2019/2016
- ASP.NET Core 3/2/1
- ASP.NET 4.8/4.7
- ASP.NET MVC 6/5
- Free email included
- WebMail Access
- POP3, IMAP, SMTP
- Unlimited Subdomains
- Unlimited FTP Users
- FTP over SSL
- SmarterStats Website Analytics
- Raw Log Files
- Plesk Control Panel
- Full Trust and Medium Trust Supported
- Isolated Application Pool
- SQL Backup and SQL Restore
- Microsoft Access Database
- MySQL
- Silverlight
- WebSockets
- AJAX
- LINQ
- Node.js
- Classic ASP
- PHP 7/5
- 99.9% Uptime
- 24/7 Technical Support
What is a Windows Server hosting?
We talk about it when the server OS is Microsoft Windows server. It includes Active Directory, DNS Server, DHCP Server, Group Policy, as well as many other popular features.
It comes with an IIS web server and Hyper-V technology. It could be easily managed with Plesk Control Panel with which you could easily create a new user, website, email, or database. When we talk about applications and databases we usually talk about ASP.NET and MS SQL servers, but you can host PHP and MySQL as well.
There are six main types – Shared, VPS, Cloud, Dedicated, Managed, and Reseller. With a shared plan, you will receive just a small part of the server resources and one shared server could host above 1000 small websites. VPS or Virtual Private Server includes some dedicated resources of the server CPU, RAM, and disk space. The Dedicated server means that you will receive all hardware resources. The Managed services are for those who do not like to manage the server themselves as server updates, backups, etc…, but the company will do it for them. The reseller services are for those who like to start a small online business and have their own customers.
How to host a PHP/ASP.NET website?
Many times we have heard the question “I am ready with my new PHP/ASP.NET website and now what? How to make it public via Internet?”. The answer is very simple and you will find it below.
1. Get a Domain name
The domain name is something very important. This is your site name and identity, for example, our domain is BestWindowsHosting.net. You could consider buying a top-level domain like .com or .net, or some local as .co.uk (United Kingdom) if you target customers from a specific country.
There are 2 options to buy your domain name, to get it from your host (you could do it when you order your account), and to buy it from one of the biggest domain names registers. We prefer the second option because you could get the domain for a better price and to be independent of your host if you decide to move your site to another host after some period. For example, you could get a cheap domain name from GoDaddy for less than a $1 ($0.99), because they are the World’s Largest Registrar with more than 60 million domains under management.
To check if your name is available you should just enter it in the search form, and if it’s free you could just add it to your shopping cart and pay for it via CC or Paypal.
2. Get an account
This is very easy, but first, you should decide what type of service you will need depending on your site/project. If you have just a small personal website or blog or a small company Image website, then you should consider getting a shared plan, which will be ideal for your needs. But if you have a larger high traffic project or more than 10 smaller websites then you could consider VPS, Cloud, or Dedicated server. When you choose your account you will be asked to provide your domain name (Use an existing domain) or to register a new one (Register a new domain). In the next step, you should choose the period, as long as the period is as cheaper as the price is. And on the final step, you should enter your personal information and pay for it via CC or Paypal. That is it, now you have an account! Remember that you will have 30-day money-back guarantee and you could cancel the account and get your money back if you are not happy with the service.
3. Set up your services
After getting the account you will receive a welcome email containing the link to the control panel with your login credentials and your server DNS settings. Before pointing your domain name to your account you should set all the important parameters in your account. The control panel will look as the one below:
Now we should set the main settings.
3.1 Email Addresses
From here you could create and manage email accounts associated with your website.
When you buy a domain name you will get Internet presence and identity, so you could create your email addresses as for example “office, info, yourname @ your+domain+name”. This is very important especially from a business point of view because it means that you are serious and it’s prestigious. So, you should click on Create Email Address link and you will see the following screen when you could type your email address, and password.
You should also take in mind that if this email account is associated with an auxiliary user (Access to the Customer Panel is enabled), the changes you make on this page affect this user’s settings. Particularly, if you change the email address and password, the auxiliary user’s login and password will be changed to the new values as well.
You could also set up forwarding of email messages to one or several email addresses. If your mailbox is switched on under the General tab, then copies of email messages will be kept in it. This is particularly useful if you have a lot of email accounts which you would like to check from one common account, or when one email box should be checked by a few persons.
3.2 FTP Access
From here you could set up access to files of your websites over FTP protocol.
By default you will have one master FTP account whose credentials will be the same as your control panel username and password, but for security reasons, it will be better to create an additional FTP account which to use later to deploy your website. So, you should click on “Add an FTP Account” and we will see the next screen when you could enter the FTP account name, Home directory (the folder that will be accessed by this account), New password (make a strong password using letters, digits and special characters, make it above 8-10 symbols. Avoid using easy guess passwords!), Confirm password, Hard disk quota (if you want to set some space limit to this account), Read/Write permissions (if the account could upload, or will able to download files).
3.3 ASP.NET Settings
From this menu you could configure the ASP.NET Framework settings.
If you host an ASP.NET website this section will be very important for you. First, you could see the ASP.NET version which is set for this domain, and you could change it via the upper link “Change Version”. Also there you could see the link “Restore Default Configuration” from where you could restore the default ASP.NET settings. Bellow the .NET Framework settings you will find the Connection string Manager section from where you could set your server connection string. After that are the Custom error settings for the Custom error modes: On, Off, Remote Only. This is particularly useful if you need to see some error details, but not to show the error on regular visitors. From the Compilation and debugging you could change the Default webpage language and Switch on debugging. Also, you could find the Globalization settings from where you could set the Request/Response encoding and Culture settings. ASP.NET trust level is another important setting that could be set from this page, the options are Full, High, Medium, Low, and Minimal. And the last is the Session settings section from where you could set the Authentication mode and Session timeout.
3.4 IIS settings
Here you can specify IIS web server settings for your website by changing the default values. Custom IIS configuration is useful, for example, when you want to use a new type of index file on your website or to associate a certain MIME type with certain filename extensions. The default values are defined by your provider.
3.5 PHP Settings
This page displays the PHP configuration for the website. These settings are specific to the website and do not affect other websites on the subscription. You can change the PHP configuration if the provider grants you the corresponding permission. Custom PHP configuration can be used, for example, to limit the consumption of system resources by PHP scripts, or meet the requirements of a certain web app. When you set the value of a parameter to Default, PHP uses the parameter’s value from the server-wide PHP configuration.
3.6 File Manager
From this section you could Create New, Upload, Copy, Move, Remove files and folders in your project.
3.7 Applications
This section contains information about all installed apps. The None value in the Installation path column means that the app is external. Such an app cannot be installed on any of your websites, it only provides a link to an external service. From here you can install the most popular CMS or forums apps like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc…
4. Set your DNS records
Basically you have 3 options, to use the DNS servers of your provider, to set up your own DNS servers or to use the domain name register DNS servers which you will receive when creating an account. To set the DNS servers you should enter into your domain name settings (at your domain register) and change the DNS servers by typing the new IP addresses provided by your host.
5. Upload your website
The final step is to upload your new website to your server. You could do this by:
5.1. Using Visual Studio.
5.2. Using an FTP client (for example FileZilla).
5.3. Using the control panel File Manager.
Congratulations, your site is online! :)
Difference between Linux and Windows Web hosting
- The server Operating System (OS)
- The Web server – IIS (Internet Information Server) vs Apache or NGINX (Linux)
- The file system – NTFS vs EXT* (Linux)
- Virtualization – Hyper-V vs Parallel (Linux)
- Control panel – Plesk vs cPanel (Linux)
Both choices are good, and usually, it depends on the used applications. ASP.NET and MS SQL servers are typically hosted on Windows, and PHP/JAVA/Python and MySQL have hosted on Linux.