Silverlight Hosting Resources

For your personal Silverlight applications, you have the option of using Silverlight Streaming. Learn more by checking out Silverlight Streaming: Free Video Hosting for All and Get Going With Silverlight and Windows Live.

For your business needs, you'll need a different service. Depending upon your application, you may need shared, dedicated or a virtualized server solution; or you may want to take advantage of cutting edge grid and cloud computing solutions, ranging from the most highly managed to the most autonomous implementations. The availability of different hosting solutions allows you to focus on building, testing and launching your web applications, leaving infrastructure, up-time and security challenges to a hosting provider. Below we've outlined hosting options and what to expect from each, along with a listing of providers in each category.

Utility Computing
Utility Computing enables the acquisition of a variety of hosted solutions based on consumption. Take advantage of these on-demand computing offers if you need a scalable test environment for your application, or if you need to allow for unpredictable and significant fluctuations in your server infrastructure. The ability to simply scale up and down in real time has gained popularity among developers and represents an efficient way to manage your computing infrastructure.

GoGrid by ServePath: BGoGrid delivers true "Control in the Cloud" by combining familiar features of dedicated server or managed hosting with the benefits of flexibility and scalability offered by cloud server hosting. Terremark: Through its Infinistructure Managed Backup service, Terremark provides a centralized, managed utility backup solution. Pay for the infrastructure you need, when you need it.

Shared Hosting
Shared hosting divides server resources among a number of customers. While sharing resources makes this type of account more affordable, a shared hosting arrangement could compromise performance since it is impossible to know what other customers are running on your shared host. Shared servers are often run by the ISP itself; they handle security issues and technical operations as they arise in a "managed" environment relieving you of many of the basic administrative tasks.

HostMySite.com: Through its Foundation hosting plan, HostMySite offers affordable services at an attractive price for those developers who primarily are creating small business or personal websites. CrystalTech: Through its state-of the art network infrastructure and datacenter, CrystalTech provides a highly available and reliable foundation for your website, email and other related services.

Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting leases or rents a server to the customer. That server is 'dedicated' to you it is not shared, regardless of utilization. You have full administrative rights and the hosting provider will not generally include administrative services beyond restoring the servers operating system to its original state. Providers will include control panel or management software to simplify remote administration. Dedicated hosting can include an element of managed security, and sometimes even managed mail services.

MaximumASP: Hosted on its multi-tiered Enterprise Class network, MaximumASP servers provide performance, security and reliability for high-end websites and applications. CrystalTech: CrystalTech offers a powerful line of Intel-based 64-bit dedicated servers with dual-core or better processors for your website and applications needs.

Virtualized Hosting (or VPS)
In VPS hosting, multiple domains are hosted on the same server and share resources. Each virtual server runs a full-fledged operating system and can be independently rebooted. Use of a hypervisor based server virtualization platform enables you to consolidate workloads onto a single physical server using a broad range of services ranging from resource-intensive services to third-party applications. Virtualized platforms are suited for trial and flexibility; you can try features and customize (or vary) your plan to match bandwidth, memory, hard disk or even database access to your business needs.

Layered Technologies: Using Hyper-V technology, Layered Technologies provides a scalable, reliable and highly available virtualization platform along with a single set of integrated management tools to manage both physical and virtual resources. MaximumASP: With their MaxV Virtual Dedicated Servers, MaximumASP provides a clustered server architecture and high-speed SAN at an attractive price point. It offers the right virtualization choice for server consolidation and disaster recovery in both development and production environments.

Managed Hosting
Managed hosting services are the most complex (but flexible) of the traditional hosting services. While shared and dedicated hosting services provide only the server (or a part of), managed hosting services add significant administration and engineering services to the mix. In a managed hosting environment, the server hardware may be owned by either the hosting provider or the customer. Most managed hosting providers have invested in high-quality datacenter space.

The Planet: Planet Northstar provides enterprise-class managed hosting for businesses of all sizes. In addition to their managed dedicated servers, their proactive service prevents IT problems, ensures scalability and leverages information technology for your competitive advantage. NaviSite: NaviSite's powerful managed dedicated servers provide reliable robust platforms for Web servers, Database servers, Application Servers, etc. Options include shared and dedicated firewalls and balancers, and custom configurations with 100% SLAs from the dedicated host you can trust.