Hi, in my previous post I discussed and compared IIS and ASP against PHP and Apache. In this post I’ll be discussing diffuculties about communicating with a MySQL database in ASP.NET on a shared hosting. As you know if you have a direct access to your web server, nothing is impossible but in most cases you can not.

For example, I am using GoDaddy’s shared hosting plans and I’m really happy with.However I am discovering the limits lately, and I am understanding what are you capable of to do with shared hosting using ASP.NET.Chances are that if you are using PHP, you have greater freedom and everything becomes possible.

Yesterday I was trying to connect to a MySQL database with .NET, I accomplished this on Windows very smoothly without having any problems.(I used ByteFX .NET library to connect MySQL).On the other hand, on Web, this is nearly impossible, you can not use external dlls on many of the shared hostings (security issue).I tried to use ODBC to connect MySQL, I didn’t use any DLLs and again I couldn’t connect to MySQL database (By the way this MySQL database is not on my shared hosting, on a completely different host), because thanks to GoDaddy, they have blocked outgoing connections to other database hosts.So I was only able to connect an inner MySQL database.You may ask why MySQL? Because you may not find free database hosts that give MSSql (there are lots of hosts that provides free MySQL databases), and also you may not have any other options other than MySQL, so in such a case your all hands are tied.

Briefly I am really considering to use PHP rather ASP.NET, day by day I discover something that is possible in all the way with PHP and not possible with ASP.NET.
This is really driving me nuts.As you see PHP gains another +1 against ASP.NET.See you next time…

Technorati Tags: PHP, MySQL, MsSQL, ASP.NET, shared hosting, GoDaddy, ODBC, ByteFX, DLL, database

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