When ASP.NET support isn't ASP.NET support

1and1.com offer cheap hosting deals and I was quick to sign up. I needed ASP.NET hosting and they fit the bill. Or so I thought.

Some of my ASP.NET apps sit atop Microsoft Access databases. (Scream and holler all you like, but there are good reasons in the cases it is so.) 1and1 sales material says their Microsoft hosting accounts support ASP.NET, SQL Server, Access, etc, etc. All fine and dandy, right?

What they didn't tell me in advance (or else I would have gone elsewhere) is that Access support is only available for old-style ASP. That's right : if you have an ASP.NET app, it cannot use Access. It has to use SQL Server. That might not sound so bad, but if you signed up expecting otherwise (and reasonably so on the basis of their sales material), you'd be in for a shock.

I bought a "professional" hosting package, which comes with 5 sites, etc, etc. But it only allows one SQL Server database, with a size cap of 100MB. So switching certain apps over to SQL Server wasn't the answer either.

And finally, I just discovered today that they don't support setting up your 5 sites as separate ASP.NET web applications! Crikey! They could at least have told me this at the start. In other words, you can have one web app with five domain names pointing at it, but you can't have five discrete web apps. So much for their "professional" package.

So if you have only a single site and a 100MB SQL Server database is more than enough, get one of the low-end 1and1.com packages. Or if you need a zillion sites, maybe one of their uber-high-end packages will do the trick, but this so-called "Professional" package stinks. It looks good on paper, but 1and1.com have severely limited it's usefulness, and without adequate pre-sale disclosure.

So, when you're going for cheap ASP.NET hosting, whether 1and1.com or elsewhere, and you have a handful of sites you want to host (e.g. in my case, a business site, a blog, and a freebie language-education website on the side), then beware you don't get suckered in to this same trap.

I hope this saves someone else the frustration and wasted time I've had to go through. That's all folks. Tune in next week for another episode of "And They Told Us Computers Would Make Life Easier...". :o)