Tim Anderson's ITWriting

October 13, 2004

monoForge offers free asp.net hosting on Linux

Some developers like ASP.NET but would prefer to run on Linux. A new hosting service has been set up by monoForge, offering hosting using Mono, the open-source implementation of .NET. The service is free for a trial period, which will be at least until the third quarter of 2005 according to the web site.

Why bother with ASP.NET on Linux? There's a few reasons. One, it's open source: find a problem and you get all the source so you can fix it. Two, Linux servers are more common than Windows in the shared hosting market, so if it takes off Mono could greatly increase the number of web servers enabled with ASP.NET. Three, some people prefer Apache to IIS, or prefer to use Linux for public-facing servers for security reasons.

Looks to me like a great opportunity to try your ASP.NET applications on Mono. Having said that, there are some worrying reports on the Mono lists of escalating memory usage with modmono, the Apache plug-in, or web applications mysteriously failing after running for a few hours. But Mono development is proceeding rapidly, so I reckon these issues will be fixed, making this an interesting alternative to PHP or server-side Java.

Another factor is that the shared hosting providers like PHP because (unlike Java) it is relatively lightweight, which means more dynamic sites can be hosted on one server. I suspect Mono is going to be more like Java than PHP in this respect, but the monoForge experience will be an excellent test case.