Windows hosting is the official home of the Microsoft technology stack on the web: sites and web applications written in ASP.NET and .NET, talking to SQL Server, served by IIS and managed through the Plesk panel. If your product was built on that stack, Windows hosting is not a preference but a requirement. PBDP delivers it with current .NET runtimes, full access to IIS diagnostics and a support team that knows the difference between an ordinary 500 error and a misconfigured application pool — and answers the phone at two in the morning.

What Windows hosting is and which projects need it

Whenever the application core is .NET, the host has to be Windows. Typical examples are internal line-of-business systems, employee portals, web-based accounting and stock tools, and enterprise applications layered on SQL Server or occasionally legacy Access files. Plenty of these were written in ASP.NET Web Forms a decade ago and still run exactly as they shipped; moving them to an open stack is a separate, expensive project. The honest counterpoint: if you are designing a brand-new product in ASP.NET Core, it will run on Linux too, so settle the architecture decision early — it determines your hosting bill.

Windows versus Linux hosting, in practical terms

At the advertising level both sell space and bandwidth; in operation they differ sharply. IIS replaces Apache, Plesk replaces cPanel, and SQL Server replaces MySQL as the primary database. The operating-system licence makes Windows plans modestly more expensive. What justifies the gap for organisations is stack cohesion: Active Directory integration, Windows services and internal IT standards that assume a Microsoft environment. If your site is WordPress or plain PHP, there is no reason to pay that premium — choose Linux hosting instead and keep Windows for the code that genuinely needs it.

What the Windows hosting package delivers

• Optimised IIS accounts: support for a wide range of .NET versions, from legacy Framework to ASP.NET Core, with per-site runtime selection.
• Full Plesk panel: file manager, databases, scheduled tasks, certificates and resource reports in one clean graphical interface.
• SQL Server databases: dedicated instances with web-based administration, scheduled backups and remote access available on higher tiers.
• SSL and secure redirects: automatic certificate issuance and renewal for every domain and subdomain, through our SSL certificate service.
• Guided migration: your .NET project moved from the previous host with tested connection strings, permissions and web.config settings, as part of backup and migration services.
• Specialist support: access to IIS error logs and Failed Request Tracing, with technicians who have shipped .NET projects themselves.

How the work proceeds

1. Technical assessment: .NET version, database size, required IIS modules and access levels are agreed before anything is sold.
2. Plan and domain: a matched plan is proposed, and if the domain is new, our domain registration service covers it.
3. Account build and DNS: the Plesk account is provisioned and the domain pointed with the shortest possible cutover window.
4. Application deployment: files uploaded, database restored, connection strings configured, and the main user journeys tested end to end.
5. Ongoing care: Windows and IIS security patches, resource monitoring and out-of-hours support as standard.

The growth path: from shared account to dedicated iron

Most .NET projects launch on a shared account and stay there happily. When a system starts demanding dedicated resources, OS-level access or auxiliary Windows services, the next rung is a Windows VPS, and at enterprise scale a dedicated server with hardware of your choosing. We know the reverse path as well: query tuning and pool configuration often remove the need for hardware entirely. If the application itself is still in development, our web application development team designs it host-friendly from day one, and for large enterprise portals the most durable pattern remains a split map — public site on shared hosting, internal services on dedicated iron.

Frequently asked questions

Can I run PHP or WordPress on Windows hosting?

Technically yes — IIS supports PHP — but it is rarely a sensible choice. WordPress runs faster, cheaper and with fewer friction points on Linux, and the plugin ecosystem is tuned for it there. Keep Windows for .NET code; if your organisation has both, run two accounts rather than forcing one platform to imitate the other.

How does SQL Server compare with MySQL on cost and speed?

SQL Server is a powerful enterprise engine, and its commercial editions are expensive; hosting plans therefore use Express with a size ceiling, which is genuinely enough for most business systems. If your database outgrows that ceiling, the answer is a VPS or dedicated server carrying the full edition — a migration we handle for you.

Do I get Remote Desktop access to the server?

On shared plans, no: OS-level access is withheld for security, and everything runs through Plesk. The moment you need to install a Windows service, a custom component or a background agent, you have outgrown shared hosting and should move to a Windows VPS with full administrator rights.

To size a Windows plan against your .NET project's real needs, contact the PBDP team; the complete hosting and infrastructure list is on our services page.