Scott Hanselman demos .NET Core cross-platform capabilities – OR – shows how hard it is to run .NET Core on linux shared hosting

Scott Hanselman recently blogged about getting ASP.NET Core to run on a cheap shared Linux hosting account at GoDaddy. The point of the article was to demonstrate that .NET Core is cross-platform and can even run with all the constraints of a shared hosting plan.

The post was impressive, but Scott repeated several times and even put it in the title of his post – “Don’t try this at home” – because of all the hacky hoops you had to jump through to get .NET Core to work.

I found the post an interesting read, but while I was reading through the article, I couldn’t stop thinking – why go through all that trouble to run .NET Core on a “cheap” ($3/mo plan that turns into $8/mo) linux plan, when you can run .NET Core out-of-the-box on Windows hosting providers – like Winhost. Even with our Basic Windows hosting plan (that starts at $3.95/mo), .NET Core is supported.

At Winhost you can deploy .NET Core apps straight from Visual Studio or, if the specific Core framework version is not on the server, you can use Self-Contained Deployment.

I totally understand that Hanselman’s blog was a “theoretical” exercise to demonstrate the versatility of .NET Core. But when you actually want to do something real with .NET Core, you are going to want to be on a hosting environment that makes it easier for you, not harder.