Windows web hosting (Max plan) review
This is a first review after about half a year of use of winhost's asp.net core windows hosting. Overall: very happy with the hosting, albeit that some features that are standard included in other shared hosting providers are missing. Pros: + Very stable, haven't had a single outage. (Unlike Accuwebhosting that non-stop crash their servers). + Support is responsive and competent. You're not first getting some call center in a low wage country that first gives you nonsense replies 3 times where you have to keep explaining yourself over and over before getting escalated to real engineers (Accuwebhosting does this) + The amount of memory and disk space is generous on their Max plan ($9.95 per month). + Pricing quite competitive, Max plan is quite good. There are some downsides, no deal breakers, but still some inconveniences/annoyances: - The control panel is ancient and missing quite a number of things that is standard in modern control panels like Plesk. They are some ancient set of aspx pages. Overall winhost seems reluctant to invest in a more full featured control panel or just using Plesk, which is a shame, because this would easily land them in the 5 stars rating. I don't understand the reluctance to change, I've seen multiple people asking for features mentioned in this list, and they're all being shot down. - No online file manager. If you need to move large directory trees around on the server, that kind of thing is painful/impossible. I've had to create a primitive file manager myself to do this. File manager is standard in other control panels. - No automated support for letsencrypt certificates. You can however do this manually using certbot. I will provide a simple helper batch file below. - No option to shut down app pool in control panel. Is standard in Plesk. You'll have to rename web.config temporarily to shut down your asp.net core web app to upload new binaries. - Download speeds are not very high. As promised, here's a little batch file to help you generate a letsencrypt certificate for winhost: ----- REM This is a simple batch file to create a Letsencrypt certificate using a CSR from a web host. REM REM Run as adminstrator, needs certbot to be installed. REM REM Get certbot from github REM REM Instructions: REM REM - Get CSR: In cp.winhost.com: Sites List, Site Manager, SSL, Click "Generate New CSR". REM If your domain name starts with www., the common name field must have www. as a prefix, otherwise it won't work. REM - Click "Submit CSR Information" REM - Copy the CSR text into a file C:\tmp\csr.txt. REM - Run this batch file. REM - When running for the first time, certbot will ask to upload a file with specific contents to a specific url. REM Create/upload this file and press enter. REM - If successful, the following output is displayed: REM Successfully received certificate. REM Certificate is saved at: C:\tmp\cert.pem REM - Open file C:\tmp\cert.pem REM - Copy/paste the contents of the cert.pem file into the web host control panel and click the submit button. mkdir C:\tmp certbot certonly --manual --csr C:\tmp\csr.txt --cert-path C:\tmp\cert.pem --key-path C:\tmp\key.pem --fullchain-path C:\tmp\fullchain.pem --chain-path C:\tmp\chain.pem pause
By Wout de Z.