With the birth of our son I quickly started to see an increase in traffic to our family blog which I was self-hosting at the time.  The extra traffic was having a negative impact on the quality of our VOIP calls and our bandwidth in general.

I bit the bullet and bought an ASP.NET hosting package with 1and.com.  At this point our blogs were running on the SubText platform and this caused some complications with 1and1.  With 1and1 if you want to host multiple websites with ASP.NET you have to point all domains to the root of your webspace and use some sort of redirection script based on the host headers.  This wouldn't be so bad except SubText uses a fairly complex system of HttpHandlers and HttpModules that do not play well with pages outside of the SubText framework.  Additionally 1and1 had problems with applications running out of subdirectories, so if I wanted to host any other domains I would have to either cop another hosting package or do some hacking in the SubText source.

When I selected SubText I had looked at several platforms (dasBlog, Community Server, etc) but never came across BlogEngine.NET until I saw my buddy was running it.

I pulled down the latest source package of BE.N and made a few modifications:

• Swapped the tinyMCE editor out in favor of FCKEditor (steps).
• Modified the themes I wanted to use to suit me
• Added a LinksList user control to add links configured in the admin portion (topic of future post).
  
• Made the necessary changes for BE.N to run under Medium Trust.
  • Remove trust node from web.config
    
  • Update the BlogRoll control to catch the SecurityException when making the WebRequest for blog details.  This does not work under Medium trust.

After moving the package up to my 1and1 space I still got SecurityExceptions regarding FileIOPermissions.  After doing some research I found other people with similar issues and repeated calls to 1and1's support to get more details about their trust level went nowhere.

So now I'm hosted on GoDaddy.  Monthly charge is less, web interface to IIS is better, and my things work the way I want them to with no problems.