This week at Tech-Ed Bob Muglia announced that IIS7 would be supported as a role in Windows Server Core 2008. If you’re not familiar with Server Core, it’s a trimmed down version of Windows Server 2008 with just the bare minimum bits needed to run.

Over the past few months we’ve had the great pleasure here at Applied Innovations to work with Microsoft and the IIS team at Microsoft as one of the earliest IIS7 Early Adopters. During the beta testing of Longhorn we had the opportunity to test Server Core and below is a short video of Carlos Caneja and myself discussing  our experience with IIS7 and Server Core with Microsoft’s own Mario Juarez and Eric Woersching (From the IIS Team).

(pictured above, Eric Woersching, Carlos Caneja, Jess Coburn and Mario Juarez)

(clicking on the image opens a silverlight player in a new window and streams the video from my website)

What Does IIS7 on Server Core Mean to Web Hosters?

For AppliedI.net, IIS on server core represents Microsoft

A few months ago we were invited by the smartertools team to become a beta tester for Smartermail 4.0. The biggest change in Smartermail 4.0 for us is the improved spam fighting techniques.  With the earlier versions of Smartermail, RBL checks and bayesian filtering was released, unfortunately spammers were already aware of bayesian filtering and had already found ways to corrupt the effectiveness of bayesian filtering.  RBLs are just hit or miss and not really effective for the most part (they tend to throw the baby out with the bath water). One of our comments at that time was “hey look at spamassassin” but unfortunately the bits had been set in stone and it couldn’t be implemented.  Appearantly we weren’t the only ones commenting on this because today we have spamassassin integration but it’s integrated far better than I could have expected. 

Enter the ninja.. Spamassassin

Spamassassin is a widely used anti-spam tool mainly used in linux. it uses a set of rules that are constantly being updated, revised and added to but also supports using 3rd party resources like razor, DCC, and pyzor which are distributed spam databases if you will.

Smartertools really researched spamassassin and realized that a windows platform would simply not run it as effectively as on unix. So they not only integrated spamassassin but set it up such that you can run a farm of linux based spamassassin servers to filter mail through. Very cool! That there is smart planning!

Daddy don’t want your mail unless you really want to get it to him.

Next is the addition of greylisting. Greylisting is an extremely simple idea. It basically rejects a message on the first attempt and then accepts it on the second attempt. Legitimate mail servers will send a message and if it doesn’t send the first time will re-attempt to send the message again a few minutes later and will continue to re-attempt the message for a set period of time until it finally times out at which point it’s bounced.  The thought being is that spammers are hit-and-run mailers. They have so many email addresses to attempt to deliver to that they simply attempt a send, if it doesn’t go through immediately they move on to the next address and abandon the previous one.  Now Grady (from Smartertools) said greylisting would probably be the biggest help in the fight on spam and I didn’t believe him. Boy was I wrong. Greylisting by itself has almost completely eliminated spam on our beta test domains. I’d say less than 10% of the spam quantity is making it past greylisting and that’s a high ballpark estimate.

What’s the trade-off for all this?

Well there’s no such thing as a free-lunch. Greylisting does delay your messages for a couple minutes and I personally have found it to not be a problem. However if it does cause a problem for you, Smartermail allows you to opt out of greylisting on your domain if you wish.

Any messages that make it through greylisting are then fed to spamassassin’s rules, dcc, razor, pyzor and ofcourse the RBLs and only then a message is delivered. Now you’re probably wondering won’t all of those post greylisting tests delay my email from being immediate? Well we’re seeing between 1 and 10 seconds per message for processing through spamassassin and based on the accuracy it’s a very acceptable trade-off and this is running on a standard linux VPS account.

Why is all this necessary?

Spam has reached epidemic proportions and has simply grown out of control.  2/3rds of all email I used to receive on my personal domains was spam.  Think about that 2/3rds of every email I’d have to wade through was spam.  This means only 30% of the time I spent working in outlook was spent doing anything productive.  For us as a hosting company spam represents a major part of our support requests each day and as a result costs us a great deal in time, resources and manpower.   Not to mention the lost revenue, time and manpower it costs our clients each day. Not to mention the cost in server hardware necessary to deal with the increased message processing (thanks to spam!). Spam is simply out of control and needs to be stopped. By implementing systems like SmarterMail 4 we may not be able to stop spam but we can definitely lessen the impact it has on us and our customers. 

The birth of a hosting company

In 1999 when Applied Innovations was first launched, it didn’t really take off like a rocket ship as one would hope.   You see, I started on the Internet around 1991-1992 via FTP, Telnet, Usenet and ahh my long forgotten friend Gopher.  I remember firing up one of the very earliest versions of UIUC’s mosaic and seeing text and images like a newspaper. I thought “wow that’s kind of interesting”.  It wasn’t until I watch the USS Enterprise animate across the screen that I realized the web was UBER-COOL!  With this revelation I quickly loaded a copy of NCSA HTTPD on a Solaris server and then various iterations of Linux. Learned HTML, then CGI programming and then PERL programming and it continued. It was with PERL programming that I found my new love.  I knew that developing interactive webcontent was going to be huge and for this Electrical Engineer it would be but a hobby, afterall I sold my soul to the world of Digital Communications, Digital Signal Processors and BEEPERS!

A month after the launch of Applied Innovations I spent two weeks studying for this fancy new exam Microsoft was touting. All these guys that they were “cool” suddenly because of this unbearably hard exam they had studied months for.  Well within that two weeks I became an Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer. I earned MCSE, MCP and MCP+I all within a 2 week time period. I remember sitting in the testing center after taking my first exam that day waiting for my second and people staring at me like I was nuts taking two exams in the same day. I wonder what they would say if they knew I passed all of them in just 5 days. Considering I had been working on computers since 82, built my first PC around 86, it’s not that hard to imagine this happening. 

Anyway, until this point Applied Innovations was a full blown apache based hosting company, IIS? Eh, windows was great for the home PC but not the web server. I needed PERL, not ASP. Once I really delved into IIS did I learn what was to come and sudden Applied Innovations started offering windows hosting.   Afterall, I can have both? ASP and PERL? If I host on IIS? How can you lose!?!

The quick growth of a hosting company

Now having done website development from the first earliest days of the web, I had already worked on numerous projects for clients and made a nice little portfolio of projects (in fact, my last PERL/MySQL project still lives today with the same design and code that I initially created). I used this portfolio of clients and launched a windows hosting company.  I had a good 30 or so clients and they were managing to pay for the server so I was happy.  Now having been an avid Internet user and dare I say developer, I had ofcourse used FrontPage before Microsoft purchased it and after. I saw the writing was on the wall and joined up to become a Microsoft FrontPage Host. Was accepted as a FrontPage host, listed on the Microsoft FrontPage resources and then the fun really started. I picked up a handful of clients and these clients soon spread the word that they had a FrontPage host that knew what was going on and was familiar with their little application/tool of choice. Suddenly we were bombarded with people wanting to sign up.  Now mind you until now Applied Innovations only hosted people I had personally worked for or knew.  Next thing I new we had people doing whois lookups and posting our phone number (my home phone number no less) on newsgroups, people leaving me voicemail messages like “Hi, um I heard you’re a webhost for FrontPage, if so call me. I need someone that knows what the hell is going on”.  I tell you it was exciting times.  Sending emails to our company email addresses, my personal email address, faxing in notes asking about hosting. It was a zoo!  I tell you we’re about to turn 8 years old and to look back on those times, that was by far the most fun.  

When people ask me how we got started? I honestly say “offering FrontPage Webhosting” and to this day we support FrontPage and will continue to support it as long as we’re around (and we’re not going anywhere). 

FrontPage, you see led to the birth of Applied Innovations. It was frontpage that let us grow and it was catering to frontpage and frontpage based apps that brought even more growth.   A few months ago it was announced that frontpage would not be released with Office 2007, that two new applications would come along, Sharepoint Designer for those looking to develop on Sharepoint services and Microsoft Expressions later to be officially released as Microsoft Expression Web.  This week Expression Web was released and alas the final chapter of FrontPage starts.

Expression Web, not just FrontPage 2.0

So you would think this would be a sad event for us to see FrontPage retiring. Well, in a way it is but we actually EXCITED to see Expression Web come forward. Let’s face it Macromedia, er I mean Adobe Dreamweaver is a great development tool and probably the tool of choice by most professional web designers, frontpage has been relegated to the tool of newbies for the most parts (though still a easy to use and powerful application). So it was inevitable that Microsoft would develop a new web design/development tool.

Expression Web, is not just a new web design tool, it’s an evolution of web design tools. It will without question be the catalyst that starts the other web design tools to evolve as well. Expression web brings CSS design to a new level of ease (I don’t know about you but I’m old school and more a developer than a designer and never really cracked the CSS egg, I understand it but think you need a degree in graphic design to really master it). Expression makes it possible for even me to write nice CSS designs.

Expression Web also becomes extensible, it brings some of the features of Visual Web Developer to designers allowing them to utilize ASP.net and start developing dynamic content that they normally would leave to developers. Do you see it? Yes, Expression Web allows developers to do design work and designers do developer work? What’s that you say? Up is now down? White is now Black? Stop means Go? No, not quite, I just checked and hell hasn’t frozen over yet (yeah we’re all still safe for a little longer). It just means that these boxes we’ve built ourselves into are going to now have doors so we can get out of them and try new things.  It’s an exciting time for designers and developers alike.

I honestly can’t do Expression Web justice trying to explain it but what I can do is provide resources and links to those that can

• First, the Microsoft Expression Family of Products website: Expression Web is just the first tool to be released
• Then, the Expression Web Blog. I absolutely love it when development companies take up blogging. I guess the team at iD could be considered the first true bloggers with their finger’s constantly getting updated (if you don’t know what a finger is you’re not Old Skool!)
• One of my favorites is the Expression Add-ins page. I believe we’ll see an even larger number of add-ins for Expression.
• Starter Kits are all the rage these days and Expression has ‘em. Expression Starter Kits.

Finally, My personal favorite resource, is our own Expression Web Resource page. That’s right Applied Innovations isn’t sitting back waiting to see what will happen with Expression Web, we’re jumping on it and offering Expression Web ready hosting immediately! All our plans are compatible with all features of Microsoft Expression Web. As a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner and ASP.NET webhost, we’re Expression Web Ready!  Best of all we’re offering those clients interested in Expression Web special hosting offers.

That’s right, we’re Expression Web hosting ready and we’re ready to support it today. We look forward to contributing to the Expression Web community and watching it grow much like we’ve watched the FrontPage community grow and ofcourse the Internet grow.

Microsoft & Zend have partnered up to improve PHP performance on IIS (yet again!). Today on Bill Staples blog he talks about the great improvements being made: http://blogs.iis.net/bills/archive/2006/10/31/PHP-on-IIS.aspx and really goes in depth with a nice demo on performance improvements being made. He has some nice screen captures, etc.  

For me though, the best part is that they’ve released an preview ISAPI for IIS6 which is available for download here: http://www.iis.net/default.aspx?tabid=1000051. This is more than just a download link page.  They really give a nice intro into what FastCGI is and why it’s so cool. There’s also a step-by-step article on how to get FastCGI & IIS working together here: http://www.iis.net/default.aspx?tabid=2&subtabid=25&i=1207

As many know, I’m a big advocate of IIS & Windows based hosting. We’ve based our company on it and have operated on IIS now for 8 years.  I know that Microsoft is committed to the webhosting industry and providing a power webserver platform for us.  I also enjoy opensource software and like to run PHP based applications.  I know from my personal experience that PHP is both safe and stable and I feel running PHP on Windows/IIS is testiment to the power of IIS.  I also believe there are too many self proclaimed “windows hosting experts” that don’t understand the technology and don’t take the time or effort to investigate it and simply proclaim “PHP is opensource, opensource is bad! Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft”.   This is obvious from my earlier posts.  I really hope these guys wake up and smell the coffee.

 

But, if you still think it’s not safe to run PHP on Windows and still want to listen to those guys that say running PHP is going to eat up too many resources and cause problems for your ASP.net sites and that you should only run Microsoft products on Microsoft products? Then that’s ofcourse your personal choice. Personally, I think you’re just burying your head in the sand with them! Honestly, take a look at sites like hotscripts.com and freshmeat.net and look at all the PHP based applications that are there. There are so many well written quality opensource (and commercial too) apps available that you’re foolish to limit yourself and not make use of these.  As for me, I see this as Bill Staples (who’s title is: Microsoft’s Product Unit Manager for IIS), giving us a demo along side Andi Gutmans (one of the creators of PHP) of PHP running on Windows!  Let’s see that’s opensource on Microsoft! YES!

For the my friends that tell me I’m crazy for running IIS and should use Apache, here’s your beloved PHP endorsing IIS!

For my friends that tell me “no Microsoft only wants you to run ASP.net on IIS” here’s Microsoft endorsing PHP! (oh yeah! opensource!).

I’m sorry guys but Microsoft is committed to making IIS THE best webserver platform on the Internet and is embracing PHP to get there! So yeah,once again WIMP (Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP) is anything but wimpy and I am really looking forward to the final updates. (Which Zend is making opensource). So repeat after me: “I host on Microsoft Internet Information Server and I’m proud of it!”

I recently posted a blog entry about my ‘informal’ apples to oranges comparison of the different virtualization platforms available for windows. Apparently I didn’t spell it out clear enough that things were not on a level playing field.  Well, guys I did it. I went and pissed off Bob. Sorry Bob.

But Bob taught me a couple lessons:

first don’t post half a**ed comparisons without coming out and telling everyone they are half a**ed comparisons and making it blatantly obvious they are half a**ed. I thought I described the different hardware that I had available at the time and mentioned that I had a brand new server on the way to do a real benchmark. He’s 100% correct though so I’m saying it here:  Guys my benchmark from 10/1 is half-assed! There I said.  (but you can bet your a** I’m going to be very thorough in my next test using the same exact machine all running only ONE virtual instance!)

second, read the EULAs & PURs! (that’s End User License Agreement and Product Use Rights) before you go doing something stupid like creating a half a**ed comparison and posting your results on the Internet.  So basically don’t just click “I Agree” and run off installing that application.

So here’s what I learned:

1. VMware’s EULA states:

You may use the Software to conduct internal performance testing and benchmarking studies, the results of which you (and not unauthorized third parties) may publish or publicly disseminate; provided that VMware has reviewed and approved of the methodology, assumptions and other parameters of the study. Please contact VMware at benchmark@VMware.com to request such review.

Okay so I can share my results with others just I can’t publish them or publicly make them available. Seems like privately sharing my results is okay though?

2. Microsoft’s Product Use Rights (a 66 page word doc of legalese) says:

i. Software. You must obtain Microsoft