Recently, I’ve stopped paying for the Windows VPS hosting service for one of my projects – mobochats.com. I’d like to find a free hosting service that can support the following:

• .NET 3.5
• LINQ to Entity
• SQL Server

It turned out that Somee.com facilitates these criteria very well! The only thing that I didn’t like was the forced advertisements which screwed up some of the html styles on the iPhone portion of the application.

Then, I’ve tried two other free ASP.NET hosting services – 0000free.com and HelioHost.org. The two services are very similar. Both used Mono/Apache for running ASP.NET web applications. The only problem is that they didn’t support SQL Server, but instead, they provided free MySQL hosting (which was not surprising).

I started with some initial porting from SQL Server to MySQL. The first milestone that I want to make sure is that LINQ to Entity for MySQL works on the server. After writing a simple proof-of-concept application and published through front page extension, I found that System.Data.Entity wasn’t supported by Mono. This is out of the development plan on the Mono webpage. Thus, I’d need to explore other options such as LINQ to nHibernate with MySQL.