Almost everything we do in an HttpHandler, we can simply do it in a normal .aspx page. Then why do we need HttpHandlers? First, the HttpHandlers are more reusable and portable than the normal .aspx pages. Since there are no visual elements in an HttpHandler, they can be easily placed into their own assembly and reused from project to project. Second, HttpHandlers are relatively less expensive than the PageHandler. For a page to be processed at the server, it goes through a set of events (onInit, onLoad, etc.), viewstate and postbacks or simply the complete Page Life Cycle. When you really have nothing to do with the complete page life cycle (like displaying images), HttpHandlers are useful, though the performance hit is negligible.