ASP Custom COM Object Support

If you have a COM Component that you have developed for your website, then our semi-shared Corporate range of hosting plans will allow us to register your COM object. We do however have some rules and guidelines which must be followed in order to protect other users of the shared servers.

• There is a £60 per hour fee for source code review and COM installation. Typically we can complete the first review in under 2 hours, whilst subsequent reviews are under an hour, provided your source code is well documented.  All source code comments must be in English.
  
  
• Only COM objects written in Microsoft Visual Basic or Microsoft Visual C++ are allowed.
  
  
• Send only your source code and any instructions required for compilation. It must be in ZIP format. Do not send your DLL's as we will only install DLL's that we compile.
  
  
• Your source code must be documented in English. Trust us, it will cost you more to leave it undocumented.
  
  
• When you make changes to your ASP components, only send the changed classes or we will have to review the entire project over which will increase your costs.
  
  
• Any COM object can be removed from a shared server if we suspect the object is effecting the server and is having a detrimental effect on the server and other customers.
  
  

General Coding

If you use or do any of the following, your code will be rejected.

• Make sure your loops exit properly and that you discard variables and objects to the memory pool when finished with them.
  
  
• Excessive use of memory is the number one cause of COM objects to fail our inspection. Keep in mind that you are in a shared hosting environment and you are sharing memory with other applications.
  
  
• If you don’t include error handling we will not be able to help you if the DLL doesn’t run as expected and we will have to assume that your DLL would exit very ungracefully when it goes wrong. This is likely to cause problems.
  
  
• DO NOT USE FORMS or any other user interface elements. No one will see them. We can’t host projects with forms even if you are only using a form to host an OCX or other form control. These controls were designed to function with a user interface and will not have been tested with NO "screen" available. Remember web servers in a data center do not have a screen each.
  
  
• We can not host code which relies on user options in the registry or other user profile elements.
  
  
• We can’t allow code that uses the CreateThread WIN32 API directly - it’s a quick way to cause hard to resolve problems. If you have to use threading use a well tested “VB safe” thread API see http://www.desaware.com/BackThreadL3.htm