Yesterday I noticed one of the sites I'd developed had stopped working, despite no changes or development on it by my self for several weeks. Turns out Fasthosts have made changes to the server configurations that prevent the popular DAL Subsonic from working. So now my clients site is down and to all extents which reflects badly on me, not Fasthosts.
There was no notice of these changes as far as I am aware. Emails back from them said they were sorry but they recommend only using Microsoft components. Well it would be nice if Microsoft offered anything as useful as Subsonic.
Fasthost say the changes were made for security reasons and unfortunately couldn't offer an alternative hosting solution – as part of keeping their prices down.
Fasthosts are cheap, and they are big, but they certainly aren't flexible. This blog is run on one of there servers, Blogware offers themes, but for some unknown reason Fasthosts have turned those off. I contacted them about that ages ago. No real reason given, and a promise that they might change this policy and would let me know if they did.
http://www.subsonicproject.com
Update – 29th December 2007
I've finally got Subsonic working on Fasthosts. It's not ideal, but it's fine if your tables and stored procedures are stable.
Use the Batch Class Generator to generate the class files for the tables. These .cs files are then put into the \app_code folder of the website and remove the buildproviders section from web.config. I also had to update to lastest version of Subsonic 2.0.3 (which allows batch generated classes to work fine).