(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Paving the way for tomorrow’s websites and applications, Windows-based hosting and managed IT services provider MaximumASP (www.maximumasp.com) has rolled out free ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 hosted beta accounts based on the new MaxESP platform.
According to its Wednesday announcement, beta users can create a website and test it out in a scalable environment by using the included Dynamic Capacity Upgrade, which can instantly increase a site’s presence during times of high traffic using application-aware load balancing.
Beta accounts are hosted on Windows Server 2008 R2/IIS 7.5, .NET Framework 4 Beta 2, and come with 1GB Disk Space, 50 MB SQL Server 2008 database, MS Deploy Access and FTP over SSL Access. Developers are welcome to sign up online (aspnet4beta.maximumasp.com).
VS2010 and .NET 4 Beta 2 were opened to MSDN subscribers in October, with their final release planned for March 22, 2010.
VS2010 features new SharePoint project templates that can leverage new configurable deployments that let users configure the way they want to deploy or retract a project. As well, SharePoint projects can be deployed either as sandboxed (run with limited resource access in a secure and monitored process) or farm solutions (that can only be run or deployed if they have admin privileges).
The .NET Framework version 4 Beta 2 includes enhancements for ASP.NET 4 in targeted areas. Some of the additions coming in .NET 4 are out-of-the-box support for ASP.NET MVC 2, improved AJAX and CSS support, improved core services, and one-click publishing.
The world’s first highly available, completely PCI-compliant, ASP.NET shared windows hosting platform, MaxESP will be powering the hosted beta accounts. First reported by the WHIR in September, MaxESP features the usual tenants of a hosting solution such as email, SQL databases, SAN-supported storage, and free backups, as well as premium features such as a free-of-charge SSL VPN service and PCI compliance at a shared price point. It also has on-demand application-aware load balancing and can run simultaneous application instances without having to rewrite code.
