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The deal aims to provide students with web space "to aid their studies", free from the restrictions of the university's local area network.

The students will be given 500MB of webspace and a bandwidth allocation of 2GB per month. They will also have access to a SQL 2005 database, support and application development platforms including FTP access, ASP classic and ASP.Net 3.5, and PHP under FastCGI.

The

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deal is being offered to all science, maths, tehcnology, engineering and design students at a UK university. The students will require an .ac.uk email address to qualify.

Microsoft has modest targets for the service. "Our aim is to have at least 10,000 students using the free hosting in 2008 and, with the support of WebFusion, we can grow this number year on year," says William Coleman, web platform architect evangelist at Microsoft.

The company is also using the offer to showcase the forthcoming Windows Server 2008. ""Partnering with WebFusion, we're giving students the ability to use the next generation of Microsoft web technologies for free while running on a stable, high performance Microsoft Windows Server 2008 infrastructure, regardless of their location," Coleman claims.

Students can apply for the free web hosting by clicking here.