In between projects I thought I'd be able to take a few hours to finally move our family website, www.mainerovers.net, over to a new shared hosting provider that offered not only ASP.NET Version 2.0 but also included in the package MS SQL Server 2005 - all at a price more reasonable than the site's previous host that wanted an additional $10 per month for adding MS SQL Server to the $10 per month hosting package. This combination would allow me to rebuild the site as a DotNetNuke web portal with the goal that my wife Laurie could then perform her own content updates.

Having just built a DotNetNuke 3.1 site for the Community Television Association of Maine on the shared hosting provider, SeekDotNet, I recalled being pleased with both their service and particularly their $7 per month hosting fee that included MS SQL server.  For my needs, the $12 per month SQL Hosting package was most attractive as it included hosting for not one, but up to three websites all with different domain names plus one instance of MS SQL Server 2005.  This would then allow me not only to recreate the www.mainerovers.net family site as a DotNetNuke 4.0 portal, but also create this site (www.wesnetdesigns.com) for my expanding work in software and website development.  The third website will be used later for one of the non-profit groups in which Laurie and I are both involved.<

Signup for the shared hosting account was quick and easy with SeekDotNet taking care of the domain registration ($13 per year) for the new WESNet Designs domain.  I received the account creation confirmation letter with temporary URL back in about 4 hours.

I decided to configure both sites as DotNetNuke parent portals using one install of the DotNetNuke 4.00.02 framework in the webspace for www.wesnetdesigns.com.  Although I have read horror stories about all of the failed installations of the framework, I had no problems with this installation or any of the other DNN installations I've done for other clients.  The key is to make sure that the MS SQL database has been properly created, the read/write permissions have been given to the ASPNET (or Network Service) account on the site's root folder, and that both database connection strings in the web.config file (renamed from release.config) are accurately specified to match the database name, userid and pwd of your MS SQL database.  As both DNN 3.2.2 and 4.00.02 require the new ASP.NET v 2.0 rather than v 1.1, you also need to make sure that the virtual directory into which you will be installing has been set to ASP.NET v 2.00 in the IIS properties.  SeekDotNet gives great flexibility and power to the account holder by means of its hosting CoPanel to set up the file permissions and IIS properties. After uploading the DNN framework install files to their new home via FTP, I then browsed to the site for the first time and watched the DNN installer do its thing without any errors.  I always breathe a sigh of relief when I see the final message and link that takes one to the new installation for the first time. Customization could now begin.

Setting up the second website (www.mainerovers.net) was very easy. I just clicked on the Add Website button in the SeekDotNet CoPanel, specified the domain name and a few other parameters then set the permissions and ASP.NET version as above.  As there would not be a second install of the DNN framework for the second portal, this was probably not necessary, but why take chances?  Since it would be several days before I would be able to cancel my prior hosting account and repoint my existing domain name to the SeekDotNet name servers, I chose to set up the second portal as a child portal of the first. That way, I could access it temporarily as www.wesnetdesigns.com/mainerovers.  Once the name server changes for the existing domain propagated around the web, a simple change of the the Maine Rovers portal alias to www.mainerovers.net would convert the child portal to a second parent portal. SeekDotNet even provides access to a sites host header/domain pointer settings so when the domain resolved itself to the new host, was able to redirect requests for www.mainerovers.net to go to the single DNN installation www.wesnetdesigns.com where the request would be dispatched by DNN to the Maine Rovers portal based on the portal alias setting.

Unfortunately, it was at this stage that I had a problem.  Even though the domain name had resolved to the new host and even though I was able to set the host header for Maine Rovers properly, anytime one tried to browse to www.mainerovers.net, they would get a page not found error - somewhere the request was getting lost at SeekDotNet.  Much to my dismay, I also found that our personal e-mail addresses tied to the Maine Rovers domain were also not being handled by the SeekDotNet mail server.  SeekDotNet also provides a DNS manager in the CoPanel.  When I checked what had been set up for the A, MX, and CName records at the time of the second website creation - I found that all entries were BLANK!  I submitted a trouble ticket to SeekDotNet and within two hours had a reply back that they had found the problem and filled in the IP addresses, etc. in the DNS manager.  Now we were cooking! Even better, our personal e-mail was back up after being out of service for about 24 hours - mostly due to the time that it takes for a change of name server information at our domain registrar to propagate around the net.

Except for the glitch in the DNS information for the second site and some confusion between me and our prior host over transfer of the existing domain registration, the process went quite smoothly.  So far, I would highly recommend SeekDotNet as an ultra-low cost shared hosting provider.

Much remains to be done to customize the two sites. Those we've chosen DNN skins for each, I'm not entirely happy with either and will be customizing them or may try different ones - I've got to try creating my own DNN skins from scratch but am much more comfortable on the software programming side than the visual design side.