ASP stands for Active Server Pages. It is a technology that enables users to design and creative interactive pages for their websites.

What do we mean by interactive? Forms, in-site search engines, blogs, user forums, newsletters, calendars, WhoIs searches, web-based email, polls, surveys, hit counters and more.

Best of all, with ASP, no longer do webmasters have to concern themselves with what browser a visitor to their site is using. With ASP hosting, your website will appear identically on all computers, on all browsers, a claim that HTML simply cannot make.

Anytime a browser requests a webpage that has the .asp extension where the more familiar .htm or .html would be, the hosting providers web server interprets any ASP scripts in the program first and foremost, before delivering any HTML info to the browser. This is why you cannot simply run ASP websites with just any hosting company. The hosting company you choose must have servers that support ASP, or else the ASP scripts you use will be rendered useless.

For those webmasters on a PC that is not Windows-based, all hope is not lost. Sun Microsystems has developed a program called Chili!Soft ASP that allows other servers — such as Red Hat, Apache, and Secure Server — and other operating systems — such as Linux, Solaris, and AIX — to support ASP hosting.

Writing and using ASP scripts is easy too — at least it is no harder than HTML. Not so big a difference, is there? And you can find an abundance of software tools all over the web (many for free) that helps even the greenest novice create interactive web pages rife with ASP.

ASP is such a versatile language that more and more hosting companies are finding themselves compelled to add ASP support to their hosting packages just to remain competitive. This, of course, is only to your advantage as you can comparison shop around for the best ASP hosting offerings right alongside all the other features you are looking for.

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