Say I have a Wordpress site that is hosted on a linux box and I want to add an entirely new piece of functionality using asp.net.
Would it be possible to host the new asp.net portion of the site on a windows server and still provide a seamless user experience? Is this a good idea? What problems could I expect to have if I have had a server setup like this?
There are several solutions.
You could get a IIS server with PHP support
Not sure if Wordpress supports it
You get get an Apache server with mod_mono (open source implementation of ASP)
*Not sure whether mod_mono supports latest ASP.net features*
You can host the asp section on a sub domain and point the subdomain to the new server. Easiest solution. You could use the same design for both the main domain and subdomain and no one will notice the difference.
Or you could setup a server side proxy to intercept the requests and reroute the request to the appropriate server.
This happens all the time and depends what you are trying to do, separating load over two servers like this could in theory improve user experience if your current server is on a high load. It is quite common to use, for example, CURL (http://curl.haxx.se/) to access functionality on another server and the effect on the user experience would very much depend on the other server, its load etc.
My personal experience is that it accessing api's etc usually slows things down a bit particularly if the second server is accessed server side as you are essentially creating a three way transport of data, where user contacts server 1, server one contacts server 2, server2 does something and then gets back to server 1 with a response, which then has to serve that response back to the user, far better if the functionality can be accessed using an ajax call so that the users browser can contact server 2 directly.
Hope this helps
You can simply setup a sub domain name and find a ASP.NET hosting company to host that. It'll seamless to the users and that's probably the best way to do so. You can also check out www.smarterasp.net for great pricing and reliability on their asp.net hosting plan. That's the company I've been using for few years.
I agree with Joyce in that there are multiple ways you could go about this. IIS7 does in fact support PHP and, for the most part, it works fairly well. With the WordPress site running in IIS, it is pretty straight forward to create a virtual directory (IIS application) to run your ASP.Net application on the same domain as your main site (ex. http://mydomain.com/ASPdotNetApp/).
If you want to keep WordPress running on your Linux server, then there are a couple of options that are probably the most common. The first would be to run your ASP.Net application on a separate Windows server as a subdomain. So your main site would still be http://mydomain.com and the new application would be http://aspnetapp.mydomain.com.
The other common option for running the ASP.Net application on a different server would be to use a reverse proxy. This was alluded to in a couple of the answers given so far but I don't think it was explicitly stated. To do this, you would run your ASP.Net application on a different server and then setup mod_proxy on your Linux server (specifically, by using the ProxyPass directive).
Information on mod_proxy can be found here and information on ProxyPass can be found on that page here.
With the reverse proxy in place, if you were to direct users to http://mydomain.com/AspdotNetApp/, they would not be aware that the application was running on a different server.
