Last week AppliedI.net announced support for Windows 2008 shared hosting and SQL Server 2008 shared hosting and I have immediately moved JessCoburn.com over to the new platform.

My blog is based on WordPress which is a PHP application. On the IIS7 platform we’ve enabled FastCGI and are using the newest build of PHP5 with the ‘non-thread safe’ DLLs for better performance in a CGI type environment. 

What’s the big deal?

Speed: because of the new DLLs and the FastCGI infrastructure. 

Security: IIS7 is even more secure with only those components needing to be enabled, enabled.

Management: Thanks to delegated management I’m not locked to using some control panel. I have full access to the IIS7 Management tools remotely and can tweak just about everything available in IIS. If I want new mime-types, I got it. If I want to change my error pages, I got it. If I need to set a directory as a virtual directory, DONE! What about enabling content cacheing? I got full control over that.

Those are my favorites. There’s more of course and there will be many other blog posts but you just gotta love Windows 2008 shared hosting. I have the ability to use the integrated pipeline and full support for ASP, ASP.NET as well as PHP. Plus with delegated management I can update my website’s settings in a shared hosting environment just like I would locally and am not locked to just a handful of settings some control panel thinks I find useful.