Chris Risner . Com

After finally being completely fed up with GoDaddy, it was time to start looking for a new host.  I spent a good amount of time (at least a few hours) looking at several different hosts as well as considering hosting my sites at home (using DYNDNS).  In the end, hosting myself (while being the most flexible option) didn’t work out due to cost.  After shopping around with several hosts I chose Arivxe to host my and several other sites.

• It’s cheap but offers the options I need
  For less than $80 I got a .Net hosting account that offered unlimited disk space, unlimited band width, hosting of unlimited domains, and unlimited SQL databases.  Now I’m not a complete idiot.  I’m aware that there is a point where “unlimited” isn’t unlimited.  However, none of the sites I host will ever approach that limit.
• Upgrades quickly
  When I first signed up, Arvixe wasn’t supporting .Net 4.0 yet (it wasn’t out yet) but they assured me that once it dropped they would start.  Days after .Net 4.0 was released, they were already supporting it. 
• Great service
  This is where Arvixe has really shined so far (and I hope continues to do so).  They have a web based support chat on their site that you can use to ask questions prior to ordering or support questions after you already have something.  I’ve never waited more than a few minutes to talk to someone and they’re always helpful with problems.  Instead of “some hosts” where they blame everything on your code and are unwilling to attempt to work with you, Arvixe is willing to do whatever they can to help you solve your problems.

The only negative point I could make about Arvixe is that some of the initial set up (restoring a database from a different host / your own server) and setting up your config file could be easier.  That being said, under both of these circumstances, the support people were a great help with solving these problems.  While I’ve only been using them for 2 months so far, they are already as easy (if not easier to use) than my previous host and their support is amazingly better.  If you’re in the market for a new host or if you’re fed up with getting crappy support, I’d recommend taking a look at Arvixe. 

Tonight I went to setup a new site on my local computer in IIS.  The web site was a pretty simple Asp .Net MVC app so I didn’t anticipate running into any issues since I already had the MVC framework installed along with .net 3.5.  So, the site was set up as an Application under my Default Web Site.  I went to go it in the browser and bam, error:

Config Error:  This configuration section cannot be used at this path. This happens when the section is locked at a parent level. Locking is either by default (overrideModeDefault="Deny"), or set explicitly by a location tag with overrideMode="Deny" or the legacy allowOverride="false".

And then to top it off:

I figured this was some sort of a config issue so after googling it, I found no end of sites talking about going into the ApplicationHost.config file (requiring admin access) and changing a value from Deny to Allow for the “handlers” section.  Unfortunately, I did this and the error was the same.  I frantically restarted the default web site, recycled app pools, restarted IIS, and got nothing.  Out of ideas, I decided to look through the ApplicationHost.config file a bit more.  That’s when I saw this line:

<location path="Default Web Site" overrideMode="Deny">
    <system.webServer>
        <handlers />

I changed the “Deny” here to “Allow” and refreshed my web site and everything was good to go.