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 […]
GMail’s Send As Feature – SMTP Relaying
Gmail allows you to define multiple “send as” addresses. So if you want to use your GMail account but send email from You@YourCustomDomain.com, this can be supported. But, to support this you need to have a server set up that will relay the SMTP mail for you. For security reasons Google won’t allow you to […]
Email, gmail, IIS, security, smtpCloud 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, SherWebStopping 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 AdministrationIIS/ASP.Net Install Error “The referenced assembly is not installed on your system”
Guest post from Rick Barber from OrcsWeb today… While attempting to install IIS through role services with other than the default options checked or ASP.Net under IIS in role services on Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 you may come across errors like the one below; ‘Attempt to install XXX failed with error code 0x800736B3. The […]
ASP.NET, IISBasic 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, WindowsCan you run WordPress on Windows? Sure, it works great!
Did you know that WordPress works – and works great – on Microsoft Windows? Sure, WordPress runs on top of PHP and MySQL, which are commonly thought to be related to Linux, but they work perfectly on Windows Server also. In fact, this blog post that you’re reading right now is running via WordPress on […]
Hosting, IIS, OrcsWeb, PHP, WordpressManually 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, WordpressUsing LogParser to Check Visitor IPs to a Certain Page
Today I noticed we were getting an increasing amount of spam on one of our form pages. I was curious to see if all of the user IP addresses were the same (in which case I’d just add them to the IIS7 IP Restrictions list). To quickly and easily figure this out I decided to […]
IIS, logparser, System Administration