To use ASP, you will need a development environment and a production environment. The development environment is where you develop your ASP code and test it. In most cases, the development environment will be your PC. The production environment is where your ASP is "live", where you upload it for actual use for the world. This will most likely be a web server of some sort.

Since ASP is a Microsoft technology, it's not surprising you need a Microsoft operating system to use it. There are non-Windows options for running ASP, but those are beyond the scope of this course. ASP is tied in directly to a web server called Internet Information Server (IIS). There is also a cut-down version called Personal Web Server (PWS) Below is a summary of the operating systems and their IIS/PWS version.

Summary of IIS/PWS versions
Operating System	Server version	Number of connections
Server 2008	IIS 7.0	Unlimited
Vista (Business, Enterprise, Ultimate)	IIS 7.0	10
2003 Server	IIS 6.0	Unlimited
Windows XP Professional (Not Home!)	IIS 5.1	10
2000 Server	IIS 5.0	Unlimited
2000 Professional	IIS 5.0	10
NT Server 4.0	IIS 4.0	Unlimited
NT Workstation 4.0	IIS 4.0/PWS	10
95/98	PWS	10

IIS 4 and 5 for Windows NT Server and 2000 Server are the fully featured versions of IIS. They are specifically made for production environments and web site hosting. IIS for NT Workstation and 2000 Professional is a cut down version. It can only host one site and is limited to 10 connections. However, it still features the HTTP, FTP and SMTP servers of the Server version and is a perfect production platform. Personal Web Server (PWS) for Windows 95/98 is a bare-bones HTTP server with ASP functionality. However, it has been known to generate errors on perfectly working code. To cover the development environment, you will need one of these.

For the production environment, you'll need a web server that supports ASP. Almost all web servers run either IIS 4.0 or 5.0. Below are some ASP-capable free hosting services: