What makes good web hosting? When someone searches for the best web host or best web hosting, what are they looking for? (Psst, just a quick reminder, content on this site may include affiliate links to help support costs of operating this blog. You can read our full disclosure here.) First though, who am I […]
IIS7 Application Pool Idle Time-out Settings
Whether you host in-house or with a managed Windows hosting provider, if you self-administer a web server it is good to know that by default IIS7 sets application pools to “time-out” after 20 minutes of inactivity. So if you don’t have any visitors to your site within 20 minutes, the application pool will shut down […]
Hosting, IIS, OrcsWeb, System Administration, tipCloud Server Flexibility
I’ve been in the industry for a long time, so I understand why the big cloud players want to lock users into predefined configurations of compute, memory, and storage. It helps balance and maximize resources, which optimizes their platform density, and of course brings them higher margins. But this isn’t best for customers. If I […]
cloud, Hosting, IIS, OrcsWeb, SherWebCloud Server Performance Metrics
It’s hard to really know what you get when buying cloud services today. Depending on the vendor they might sell their services with set amounts of “cores”, or “compute units”, or “vCPUs”. Storage might be spinning disks in speeds ranging from 7,200 RPM to 15,000 RPM or the storage might be newer solid state drives […]
Hosting, Linux, performance, WindowsStopping All Sites on a Windows Server Without Stopping IIS
I had a need recently to stop all the sites running on a Windows server, but I didn’t want to stop IIS. This specific server has hundreds of sites running on it, so stopping each one at a time would have taken an excessive amount of time. So with a little Google-fu I stumbled across […]
Hosting, IIS, System AdministrationConvert a Folder to an Application on a Remote IIS Host
The topic recently came up of the best way to convert a folder to an application on remote shared hosting server. Some hosts may have this built-in to their control panel. I know many (like Cytanium) have options in the control panel to create Virtual Directories, but sometimes an application specifically needs its folder to […]
cytanium, Hosting, IIS, System AdministrationBasic IIS Performance Statistics
There are some neat counters available in Windows Performance Monitor for showing some IIS (Internet Information Server) statistics. My three favorites are: Current Anonymous Users: This counter shows the number of current anonymous HTTP connections. Since most web sites serve content to anonymous users, it’s the one that seems to make the most sense to […]
Hosting, IIS, performance, System Administration, WindowsCSS Style Overlaps, Duplicates, and Priorities
I sent most of this past weekend trying to get a nice looking responsive table to work. At first I tried to mess with it from scratch. Then someone recommended I look into Twitter Bootstrap. Wow, am I glad I looked into Bootstrap because that has saved a ton of frustration. Okay, so I have […]
css, Hosting, Learning, tip, TroubleshootingExtend Your Linux Disk Space
I was pondering an interesting, and likely fairly common, situation last night so this morning I was up early getting my geek on (aka, playing, testing, and troubleshooting). If someone has a Linux VM (cloud server or whatever) with a set size but then need to add more space to their system and make it […]
centos, Hosting, Linux, System AdministrationManually Remove the W3 Total Cache WordPress plugin
I installed the W3 Total Cache plugin last night and enabled about 1/2 of the features. Everything seemed fine initially so I left it alone. Today I went to write a post and noticed my site was down. Yikes! No idea how long it was down because no one bothered to tell me (thanks for […]
cytanium, Hosting, IIS, Troubleshooting, Wordpress