I’ve mentioned it before, but it is worth saying again. When I decided to build my site up from its static beginnings and add on various asp.net-driven applications, I needed a host that provided SQL Server database access for a reasonable fee and easerve (Server Intellect’s old name) came highly recommended. Turns out to be the best hosting decision I have ever made.

Once I realized the level of support and stability that this host provided, I decided to move my personal blog onto my own installation of .Text at http://blogs.duncanmackenzie.net. At the time, my blog was being used to populate the Visual Basic and C# developer center home pages at MSDN (and it is still used for the VB home page), so it was very “mission critical” for my job and for the site. The Visual Basic developer center is one of the most popular pages on a very high-traffic site; I was placing a lot of faith on Server Intellect’s ability to deliver my content reliably. I haven’t had a single issue with the uptime or performance of my feed since that time, so I guess my faith was well placed. At one point, due to a little bug at the MSDN side of things, my feed wasn’t even being cached and was retrieved once for every single hit to the VB and C# developer centers…. so Server Intellect contacted me and let me know that they were removing my bandwidth cap to make sure I didn’t run into any issues until we could resolve the issue on the MSDN side….

Anyway, enough gushing, here’s my point: I’m very happy with my web host, and I don’t think I would have felt comfortable moving my blog off of blogs.msdn.com onto any other company’s servers…. if that information helps you to pick a web host of your own, that’s great :), especially if you end up running a bunch of ASP.NET code on your new site!