Aliant: Here. To annoy you!

As a web developer, I’m constantly working on small projects. I love trying out the latest technology and seeing it work online. Because of this, I am always out looking for web hosting.

This time, I was searching for ASP.NET hosting. I thought that instead of going to the big websites hosted down in the states, that I would look locally first. After doing some searching, I found that Aliant had a pretty good package available. Check them out here. It clearly says that they support ASP.NET. I even called to confirm that they could support my application. They assured me that it would work, so I signed up and started setting things up.

My first comment is that their web management interface is utter crap. I say this after working with a lot of other hosting providers. The interface is terrible to navigate, slow, and the settings are difficult to manage. Aliant could take a lesson from nearly every other provider out there, even the small $5/month companies. However; as long as it works, I would be content. Needless to say, you can tell where I’m going with this.

So, after turning on ASP.NET support, I published my application to the server. I navigate to the page and bam. ASP.NET error page telling me that the virtual folder is not configured as an application. Makes sense, so I start looking for a way to configure it as an application. Remember when I said their interface is crap? Well, I wasn’t able to find where to configure it, so I start up a chat using their 24/7 robot support.

I inquire where I can go to set the folder to be an application. The response?

AlexG: I apologize, but we do not provide such service. You should to upload any ASP.NET script to any folder within /public and may access it from browser.

Immediately after this I get the following message:

AlexG: Is there anything else you would like me to help you with today?

Yes, maybe you can help me with THIS problem for starters!! I then ask about why this isn’t configurable. I also explain to him that I need to set this up so that the application can access the DLL files in the bin folder properly. His response?

AlexG: We support only *.aspm and *.aspx pages. We also support .vb extension if you use it in CODEBEHIND. Please note that you may use SRC directive in order to use .vb files for the CODEBEHIND. It is the only alternate I may suggest you instead of DLL.

Wow. I was blown away. I would love to hear from anyone who has built an ASP.NET application that does not compile it’s code into DLL files. Serously, what does Aliant think this is - 1997? Nobody writes ASP.NET code this way. And once again I get this lovely response:

AlexG: Thank you for being patient while I researched your issue. Is there anything else that I can assist you with today?

So, I called and canceled the hosting. No questions asked. In a way I was hoping they would ask why I was canceling to explain to them how they are lying about the services they provide. I guess I’ll have to settle with blogging about it instead. If I’m lucky someone there might read this and actually explain to people they support ASP.NET in such a way that it is useless to anyone asking if they support it. I think it should ultimately be removed from their feature list.

Thank you Aliant - for being here to annoy me!