ASP stands for application service providers. An ASP is a company that offers access to applications or software-related services via the Internet. These services are usually provided for a monthly fee depending on a number of users accessing the services. The ASP services have gained lately more and more popularity, and are expected to grow even more as companies tend to use more outsourcing services or have the intent of moving applications off their employees computers to put them on special application servers where they can be accessed as thin client workstations (i.e. Citrix solutions, Terminal Server from Microsoft, etc.).

A completely different use of ASP is that of Active Server Pages, a server-side programming language developed by Microsoft.