Well bear in mind that Asp.Net is a large framework. The minimal approach I mentioned is for creating APIs [0] which you can use with whatever JS front end you please. If you don't want a JS front end Asp.Net has four different options for building web front ends [1].
The hosting question has me a little confused I guess. You don't need anything special to deploy or run modern .Net code? You can run your app anywhere that the Asp.Net Core runtime is supported [2]. Or bake your app into a container and run it anywhere that understands containers. MS has tutorials for deploying to Azure [3], but I honestly know nothing about it (Azure). Every place I've worked at that had cloud infrastructure has used AWS, and I've never needed to deploy a hobby app.
> The hosting question has me a little confused I guess.
I'm not sure how much you've played with Node, Ruby, etc BE ecosystems but there are plenty of "just `git push` and watch you app automatically deploy" services out there that makes it really easy to get started playing around with the actual framework and not get bogged down in docker files or AWS configuration.. Maybe I'm spoiled, but I'm also... busy. And I'd like to be able to try out a framework first before I decide if I wanna invest a lot of time working on a full-fledged project with it and these sorts of tools are perfect for that
Do you not run your code locally when testing and evaluating things? I guess in my mind where and how an app is hosted is largely orthogonal to the choice language or framework.
Edit: Assuming a modern framework that can run basically anywhere. Something like old school .Net Framework that is essentially restricted to Windows and IIS would be a different story.
The hosting question has me a little confused I guess. You don't need anything special to deploy or run modern .Net code? You can run your app anywhere that the Asp.Net Core runtime is supported [2]. Or bake your app into a container and run it anywhere that understands containers. MS has tutorials for deploying to Azure [3], but I honestly know nothing about it (Azure). Every place I've worked at that had cloud infrastructure has used AWS, and I've never needed to deploy a hobby app.
0: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/tutorials/min-...
1: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/tutorials/choo...
2: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet/7.0
3: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/quicksta...