Last monday (the 15th of october 2007), I finaly decided to get some decent ASP.NET hosting. I registered a bunch of domains at GoDaddy about two years ago. While their php packages are nice, their ASP.NET isn't. I wanted a sense of control over my hosting, so I looked around and found DiscountASP.NET (the hosting provider this site is currently running on). They had a nice demo admin panel that showed the things I wanted to see, so I purchased a package and now here we are :)

You might notice the front-end of the site is almost identical to www.nkcss.com. While this is true, I created that site in PHP years ago, while this site is created in ASP.NET 2.0. During the day, I earn a living by programming web applications in Visual Studio .NET, so why wouldn't I create my own site in the same language? The old site hasn't been updated as much as I had wanted to do, but never got around to. I plan to do things differently on this site.

The main focus is to create a site that is fully managable by me via the site itself. The site will function as my way to talk about cool projects I have done, tools and solutions I created and similar projects. It will also be a place of information, sharing some insights into (.NET) programming that will hopefully be of use to others. The final reason for me to create this site is to have something to look back on in a few years, cataloging the things I have done and learned over time.

I hope you enjoy nickkusters.com as much as I will.

Thoughts and other feedback are always welcome, feel free to leave a comment for me here.

Sincerely,

Nick Kusters.

Small Update:

After a few days, I wasn't quite as pleased with DiscountASP.NET as I thought I would be. The bandwidth available was just too little; it took over 30 seconds to load my page! There was also a delay in communicating with the SQL server, so I canceled my account and decided to give IX Web Hosting a try and signed up for their Business Plus Shared Windows hosting account, which also offered a lot more flexibility then DiscountASP.NET did and it included Microsoft SQL Server 2005 without additional charges (DiscountASP.NET charges $10 a month for a 300MB database). They also offered a lot more disk space and bandwidth for a much better price (with DiscountASP.NET I paid $90 for a year of hosting (3 months free) and $120 for once year MSSQL with a 300MB quota. This totaled at $210 USD a year while I got a lot more at IX Web Hosting for $214.80, so for $4.80 I get two years instead of one, better performance and more features - easy call :)

I'll stop this rant here; feel free to check it out yourself if you are looking for hosting.