Microsoft Silverlight Compatible Web Hosting?

Lately I’ve been seeing some web hosts adding Microsoft Silverlight support to their hosting features. Maybe I’ve been living under a rock, I don’t know but it seems I never took the time to find out more about this.

It sort of got my attention because I never heard of any specific needs to host some Silverlight stuff. Just like some web hosts say their hosting plans support CSS or Javascript or that they are Dreamweaver-compatible; it sort of makes me smile ’cause it has nothing to do with web hosting. A web server doesn’t care if it’s serving a CSS file or a Javascript file because this is all client-side stuff.

Anyhow I wasn’t sure about Silverlight web hosting requirements so I did a little research.

What Is Microsoft Silverlight?

Microsoft Silverlight is a web browser plugin that provides support for rich content applications like audio, high definition videos and animation. It can also deliver .NET-based interactive applications on major browsers for Mac, Windows and Linux.

Microsoft Silverlight will be also be made available on Windows Mobile and Symbian OS mobile devices through a third party tool, helping online publishers and businesses to reach new markets. Similar products include Adobe Flash and Shockwave.

And What About Hosting Silverlight Applications?

I’ve googled “silverlight web hosting” and found a couple of web hosts that were qualifying themselves as “Silverlight Compatible”. Just for the heck of it, I clicked on the live chat link and asked a few sales rep about the hosting requirements for Microsoft Silverlight.

I will not name any of these web hosting companies but one said that it needed IIS and some special configuration while the two others said it needed some specific server-side applications to run.

I’ve finally found this page on Microsoft’s official Silverlight website.

Will Silverlight-based applications and content run on any Web Server?
Silverlight works with any Web server just like HTML does. Video and audio content can also be progressively downloaded and played back from any Web server platform.

And then I’ve found this note about content streaming with IIS:

The new IIS Media Pack Bit Rate Throttling feature allows you to do progressive downloads from IIS with increased scalability and reduced bandwidth costs.

Finally heading over IIS.net, I’ve found a tutorial that says that you need to add the following MIME types to IIS in order to host Silverlight applications:

  MIME Type
   .manifest
  application/manifest
   *.xaml*
  *application/xaml+xml*
   *.dll*
  *application/x-msdownload*
   .application
  application/x-ms-application
   .xbap
  application/x-ms-xbap
   .deploy
  application/octet-stream
   .xps
  application/vnd.ms-xpsdocument

So I guess there are really some requirements for hosting Silverlight applications. But if you’re running your own Windows dedicated server and it’s not “Silverlight-compatible”, don’t worry you can make the appropriate configuration changes easily by following this tutorial.

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