If you’re still using FrontPage to design your web site and are looking for FrontPage hosting with FrontPage Extensions, chances are you’re no longer going to find a web hosting provider that supports it. Microsoft FrontPage has been on the market for over 18 years with official support from Microsoft being dropped on April 14, 2009. An extension to that ended April 8, 2014.
Considering that Microsoft doesn’t support FrontPage any longer, it’s important that you begin to make a change to a newer web development/publishing software to continue building and maintaining your website.
Hosting Providers End Support for FrontPage server extensions.
Majority of web hosting providers no longer support FrontPage Server Extensions as a result, especially since they are known for causing issues (security and daily use) due to the software not being maintained for many years.
Can you still use FrontPage to Publish?
Yes, despite the fact that Microsoft has ended official support for FrontPage, you can still use it to publish your website to your hosting provider. However, you will not be able to publish your website using FrontPage Extensions. You will be required to publish your FrontPage website via FTP.
Just remember, if you continue to use FrontPage and as web standards change over time you FrontPage will essentially create outdated websites. Here’s an official note from Microsoft’s website:
The FrontPage Server Extensions are considered deprecated technology and are being phased out of Microsoft products in favor of modern standards. Designers who use FrontPage Server Extensions components are likely to encounter problems with modern Web browsers. Many hosting companies are also dropping support for FrontPage Server Extensions due to the fact that Microsoft hasn’t released a new version in many years.
Expression Web users who are using FrontPage Server Extensions for authoring Web sites by connecting to servers using HTTP should adopt modern technologies such as FTP (including SFTP and FTPS), WebDAV, or by using disk-based sites.
Are there alternatives to FrontPage?
There are many alternatives to FrontPage. The web has changed big time since when FrontPage was relevant. Pretty much any web editor these days will require you to have some understanding of HTML and CSS, instead of the drag and drop functionality of FrontPage that you’re used to.
While there are a ton of text-based editor’s out there, if you’re coming from FrontPage, I totally recommend you checking out WordPress, which is a powerful content management system that will allow you to create amazing websites using a theme-based system. I’ve even come up with a step-by-step tutorial on How to make a website with WordPress.