Archive for the ‘Windows Webhosting’ Category
January 4th, 2010 | 
Author: Microsoft has loosened the usage rights (SPUR) around Windows Web Server 2008 R2. This is the low cost server license available from Microsoft. In the past you were limited on what could run on this server to only include web servers (HTTP) no database servers, no DNS services, nothing. This meant you needed to opt for the more expensive licenses and many customers would opt against splitting these services out to independant servers for this reason.
3 Blog posts to say “Hey I’m running on my site load balanced using ARR”. This is the third and hopefully last blog post for tonight. I posted two other posts tonight:
- Discusses the first stage of Applied Innovations Cloud Initiative.
- Discusses ARR & Load balancing.
I broke this post up into a series of posts. The first post (just published) gives an overview of ARR in IIS7 and why it’s cool. This post is going to talk about the first stage of cloud computing we’ve deployed at Applied Innovations and the benefit’s of it such that you could use it today to control your own hosted IT Infrastructure costs.
In the 10 years I’ve been working with Windows as a web hosting platform (and the 15 or so I’ve been working with web servers period), I can confidently say that IIS7 is without question the best web server platform to date. Microsoft has been working on a plug-in for IIS called Application Request Routing (or ARR). The first version of ARR provided a suite of tools that allowed it to function as a Application Layer Load Balancer! The recently updated beta version extends that functionality and now makes it easy to turn a Windows Server running IIS7 into not only a Load Balancer but also a Reverse Proxy / Cache Server. Meaning you could potentially power a CDN using a bunch of Windows Servers.
Posted in Web Technologies, Windows Administration, Windows Webhosting | 
Tags: application request routing, arr, iis7, windows hosting | 
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