Appliedi.net Windows Web Hosting Blog

Applied Innovations’ Hyper-V VPS plans deliver end-to-end, highly available and scalable managed solutions that include backups, security updates and monitoring. Get enterprise-level performance for as little as $99.95 per month.

Got some questions before you’re ready to spring into the Cloud?  Okay, let’s break this down.

What do we mean by “High Availability?”

The Applied Innovations’ Hyper-V VPS solutions are designed to provide clients with automatic failover, which helps ensure 100% uptime.

Uptime = Availability = GOOD
Downtime = I couldn’t find your website so I bought from your COMPETITOR = BAD

What’s this about “Scalable?”

With all our Hyper-V VPS plans, you can easily and inexpensively increase or decrease hosting resources to correspond with your changing business needs. So memory, storage space and even additional virtual machines can be added or removed from your plan quickly and painlessly. You can scale up or down seasonally, or in response to the growth of your business.  And your site can easily be transferred from a virtual to a physical machine without moving all your data. So you can just go about your business, and you don’t have to sign a long-term contract or invest in all kinds of expensive hardware.

Scalable = Flexible = EXCELLENT

Rigid = You have to pay for it NOW and you are STUCK with it whether you need it or not = SUCKS

Why should you care about “Managed Solutions?”

This means Applied Innovations takes care of everything from backups, to security patches and OS updates, to monitoring your server.  All that stuff that you could certainly do yourself, but it all takes time. Which means it takes you away from your business.

Managed = No Hassle = AWESOME

Unmanaged = It’s all on you: updates, patches, backups, monitoring = DEFINITELY NOT AWESOME

And finally: are we just blowing smoke when we say “enterprise-level?”
We don’t think so. This means you don’t have to have a whole IT staff to be able to rely on your website to support your business. It means you don’t have to hire an engineering team just to ensure you stay online.  It means that your business won’t be held back by technology and infrastructure limitations… at least not when it comes to hosting.

So if you want performance and flexibility at a price that won’t knock the wind out of you, an Applied Innovations Hyper-V VPS plan could be your invitation to hitch a ride on the Cloud. And for as little as $99.95 per month, it might be a ride you just can’t miss.

Act now and you will receive free setup on our Hyper-V plans.
The $39.95 set up fee will be waived when you enter coupon code: SpringIntoVPS

>> Click here to signup.

Popularity: 9% [?]

There’s an old adage our parents used to live by: Speed, Quality, Price: Pick Two.  Well, the paradigm has shifted. This case study illustrates how Atlanta Cutlery got a bigger, faster, more reliable web hosting solution from Applied Innovation without breaking the bank. And it all happened in a week’s time.

The Situation:
Atlanta Cutlery has one week to prepare its ecommerce website – MuseumReplicas.com – for a huge burst of traffic. How huge? Their best guess is an increase of somewhere between 300% and 3000%. But the bump is only expected to last for a few days. They need a hosting solution that can be quickly deployed, is scalable in real time, and won’t require a long term contract to implement.

The Solution:
Applied Innovations implements a creative, cutting-edge solution that saves more than 70% off the cost of deploying dedicated servers. By launching a fleet of virtual web servers and hosting them on existing nodes, additional servers required no additional hardware inventory, and could be provisioned in under an hour. The solution is scalable, economical and a complete success.

The Results:
Atlanta Cutlery’s MuseumReplicase site averaged 150,000 visitors per day over the three days of the surge, and the site was actually faster than it had ever been. Product sales increased significantly, and even remained higher than normal after the burst.

Read the whole teeth-gritting, nail-biting, white-knuckle story here. Make sure you’re sitting down.

>> Download the Museum Replicas Case Study

Popularity: 4% [?]

You count on Applied Innovations to be the Wizards behind the curtain, keeping your website running seamlessly, with no delays or downtime, no glitches or hiccups. In this short video demonstration of Live Migration, have a peek at some of the “magic” that we’ve got up our sleeves.

Live Migration is the movement of a virtual machine from one physical host to another while continuously powered up and running its applications with no perceived downtime by the machine’s users. This means that we can move a live website from one server to another – to do maintenance or updates – without any impact on the user experience. So your site visitors can be conducting transactions, uploading files via FTP, processing forms, whatever. They’ll never know that anything changed; no latency or broken connections or interruptions.

Live Migration is a function of Hyper-V, just one of the enabling technologies built into Microsoft Windows Server 2008, and it’s a key element of the bag of tricks that lets Applied Innovations “do our magic.” Our VPS Hosting plans powered by Hyper-V allow us to offer a cost effective platform at a fraction of the cost normally associated with this level of performance.

In this short video demonstration, we reveal all the secrets behind Live Migration. Suddenly, the hush of anticipation falls over the crowd…

Popularity: 4% [?]

South Florida CodeCamp is hosting free training in Microsoft .NET Technologies on Saturday, Ferbruary 27, 2010.

At this event you can expect a lot of free training on Visual Studio 2010, C# 4, VB 10, Azure, .NET Framework 4, ASP.NET MVC Framework, ASP.NET 4, jQuery, WPF, Silverlight 4 and more.
The event will have speakers from the local community and beyond who will be presenting some of the most requested topics like ASP.NET AJAX, Visual Studio 2010, MVC Framework, Silverlight, Windows Presentation Foundation, SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008R2. Codecamp is like Tech-Ed for Free but it’s community driven by a group of dedicated volunteers and speakers.  We have been going to this event for the past 4 years and have a great time talking to developers from all over.  If you are any type of developer this a must go to event.

Once you get there be sure to stop at our booth as we’ll have plenty of giveaways for you.

 Breakfast and lunch are included!
Event Date: February 27, 2010 7:30 am – 5:45 pm
Location: DeVry University
2300 SW 145th Avenue
Miramar, FL 33027 [directions]
Registration: Click here for registration.
Nearby Airports: MIA

Popularity: 3% [?]

We are excited to spotlight an application that allows our shared hosting users to easily backup and restore Microsoft SQL Server 2000, 2005, and 2008 databases in real time. (Although our shared hosting services already include free automatic nightly backups of MS SQL databases, these backups are archived internally and accessible only via our customer support department).

By using this web based tool (accessible via our control panel), shared hosting customers are able to generate a real-time backup from any MS SQL database server and download it instantly as a .bak file to their local environment. The solution also allows our shared hosting customers to upload real time changes to their databases – for example, developers who are working in a local environment can use this tool to upload local changes to the database instantly.

If you are making changes remotely to your live database, the tool also allows you to make a backup and have it ready to restore in case you need to roll back changes.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Kentico CMS for ASP.net V4 packs all the necessary  features to run a corporate web site, online store, or community site based off today’s web standards with ZERO programming.  This makes the deployment as well as the management process fairly simple for the non-technical user.

 The application requires ASP.net 2.0 and will run on any the following platforms.

• Shared Hosting on II6 or the IIS7 plans(Requires a minimum of a VS-1 plan).
• Virtual Private Server (running windows 2003 or windows 2008).
• Dedicated server (running windows 2003 or windows 2008).

This video demonstrates how to easily install Kentico CMS from our shared hosting control panel and how to retrieve as well as install a free license if you plan on running the free or Lite version.

Please note the following:

• If you are running an IIS6 shared hosting plan then you must enable asp.net 2.0.
• Customers using a temporary URL then planning on going live with their actual domain  must generate and install licenses for both URL’s.

Learn more about Kentico CMS by visiting the following resource pages.

• Full list of Kentico 4.0 features.
• Feature matrix based on edition.
• Kentico 4 pricing.
• Kentico documentation.
• Appliedi.net & Kentico Hosting page.

Popularity: 9% [?]

The new homepage look and feel enhances the user experience by reducing page load times, facilitating overall site navigation, and increasing the aesthetic appeal. The new design also introduces an animated splash screen that better sells our wide variety of hosting services.

Our designers are currently working on the next version of our entire website, which will launch later this summer.

What do you think?

Popularity: unranked [?]

Failed Request Tracing (also called FREB) is an IIS7 request-based tracing tool that helps figure out what exactly is happening to web server requests and why. Poor performance on some requests, authentication-related failures on other requests, or even server 500 errors from ASP or ASP.net were a nightmare to troubleshoot in previous IIS versions since the web server would never tell you much of what was going on. FREB simplifies the process by capturing the trace of the problem when it occurs and by showing you a granular view of what is happening at the web server level. In other words, Failed Request Tracing allows you to look under the hood of your car and plug in a diagnostic tool that can tell you what is wrong with any of the engine components.

To use FREB, developers or web server/site administrators simply create a set of rules that will trigger a trace. Once triggered, FREB will log that request to disk and pull in all the relevant trace information.

Once a trace output is created the IT professional looking at the XML based output with a browser may easily determine if the problem is web server or code related.

Rules may be created that can trace virtually any request on the server, including PHP or other development frameworks. This is a similar feature that is also part of the ASP.net framework which by the way may also be integrated with the FREB output as long as you have tracing enabled  for your asp.net application.

This short video tutorial demonstrates the entire FREB process with a PHP based website.

In order to enable this feature on shared hosting services you must contact our support staff as it does require some higher level administrative tasks that are not yet delegated in IIS 7. It is also important to mention that there is some overhead associated when FREB is turned on and therefore it is good practice to have it turned off when you know your site is running with no known problems.

You can learn more about FREB and Windows 2008 hosting by visiting our knowledgebase or by visiting appliedi.net/iis7-hosting.

Popularity: 29% [?]

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) in March, and although its deployment has been slow, the new browser has created a potential concern for designers and developers.

The new browser introduces a slew of fundamental improvements, including security, ease of use, and support for RSS, CSS, and Ajax. Most noteworthy in IE8, however, are the significant changes in the way pages are rendered. In contrast to previous versions of IE, Microsoft has made a gallant effort in IE8 to render pages in greater conformity to web standards.

Although standardization enables consistent development across browser platforms, sites designed for older versions of IE may not display as intended in IE8. (Learn about rendering in IE at Microsoft’s IE Compatibility Center.)

To mitigate display issues, Microsoft has introduced in IE8 a “compatibility view” that enables sites to revert back to IE7 rendering. It’s a quick fix that enables webmasters to punt on the IE8 rendering changes. To force display in compatibility view, simply add the following meta-element to your pages:

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=EmulateIE7″ />

Since other browsers will ignore this code, Microsoft suggests this approach has the best blend of allowing web developers to easily write code to interoperable web standards while not causing compatibility problems with current content.

You can also address this issue by adding HTTP Response Headers in IIS6 or IIS7 [read]. This is very convenient for any web developers that have static sites.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Since launching Windows Server 2008 (IIS7) last year, we have worked diligently to continue to provide an up-to-date, feature-rich hosting environment. As discussed in this month’s newsletter, we have introduced a variety of significant improvements to our Windows Server 2008 (IIS7) hosting services.

Scale your site as your needs change

One of the biggest requests we received from Windows Server 2008 (IIS7) customers was for increased flexibility and scalability in our shared hosting plans. To meet this need, we have added two additional shared hosting plans (for a total of three) to enable customers to scale between a variety of hosting plan capacities.

Our hosting platform also enables our customers to easily move beyond shared hosting when their needs grow too large for a shared platform. Within minutes, we can move fully-active web sites from a minimal shared hosting plan to a fully managed dedicated server – with virtually no downtime. Windows Server 2008 (IIS7) has a complete set of features that helps make these rapid server migrations possible.

Integration with our control panel

Windows Server 2008 (IIS7) offers remote administration. This is a powerful new  feature that allows a non system admin to manage IIS features via the IIS Manager in a secure and granular fashion.  Customers can now enable feature delegation directly from their hosting control panel.

We created this short video to demonstrate the process:

New IIS7 modules added and accessible

We have installed and exposed a variety of IIS7 modules. Here are brief descriptions of the newly introduced IIS7 modules along with some links to our knowledge base:

IIS7 Media Pack – The IIS Media Pack 1.0 includes the Bit Rate Throttling and Web Playlists extensions for IIS7, which enable you to:

• Save bandwidth costs by throttling the speed at which content is downloaded
• Decrease network traffic by metering your media deliveries
• Monetize media assets with Web playlists that personalize content and prevent ad skipping
• Intelligently deliver multiple media formats from a single server, including .wmv, .flv, and .mp4 files

IIS7 URL Rewrite Module – The Microsoft URL Rewrite Module for IIS7 provides flexible rules-based rewrite engine that can be used to perform broad spectrum of URL manipulation tasks, including, but not limited to:

• Enabling user friendly and search engine friendly URL with dynamic web applications;
• Rewriting URL’s based on HTTP headers and server variables
• Web site content handling
• Controlling access to web site content based on URL segments or request metadata.

Failed Request Tracing - Sometimes called FREB, the request-based tracing provides a good way to figure out what exactly is happening with your requests and why, provided you can reproduce the problem you are experiencing. Problems like poor performance on some requests, or authentication related failures on other requests, or even the server 500 error from ASP or ASP.net can often be very difficult to troubleshoot–unless you have captured the trace of the problem when it occurs.

PHP Driver for SQL - The SQL Server Driver for PHP is a PHP 5 extension that provides data access to SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008. The extension provides a procedural interface for accessing data in all versions (including Express) of SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008. The SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP API includes support for Windows Authentication, transactions, parameter binding, streaming, metadata access, and error handling

Request Filtering – IIS7 incorporates all the core features of URLScan into a module called Request Filtering and added a feature called Hidden Segments.

Database Manager – IIS Database Manager allows you to easily manage your local and remote databases from within IIS Manager. IIS Database Manager automatically discovers databases based on the Web server or application configuration and also provides the ability to connect to any database on the network.

IIS Reports – This application extends IIS7 Manager by adding a new Reports option that gives you a few reports of the server and site activity.

Reducing costs through flexibility

One of the key features of IIS7 is its ability to leverage both ASP/ASP.NET and PHP applications on the same platform. Our customers can now harness excellent performance from PHP based applications in our Windows Server 2008 (IIS7) environment, and thereby eliminate the need to deploy concurrent platforms. This helps to reduce the total cost of ownership of any Web application, and streamlines server management.

Popularity: 10% [?]