Appliedi.net Windows Web Hosting Blog

We think WebMatrix is a pretty amazing tool and apparently we’re not alone as there’s about 700,000 mentions of it throughout the web today. We wanted to put together a list of great tutorials, tips and tricks that have been posted on the web and here’s our favorite 7 sites.

7 favorite WebMatrix Tricks & Tips Sites.

1. Bilal Aslam’s Common Errors & Workarounds

Bilal works as a PM at Microsoft and has posted a list of 5 common errors and their solutions on his blog. This ranges from “The application pool that you’re trying to use has the ‘managedRuntimeVersion’ property set to ‘v2.0’ to “Bad gateway: check proxy settings’ which are all pretty common errors today.

2. Charles Nurse’s Creating a DotNetNuke site and deploying it to a hosting account.

Charles actually has two blog posts the first one is WebMatrix and DNN – Using WebMatrix to setup your DotNetNuke Site. and the second is Using WebMatrix to Publish Your DotNetNuke Site. if you’re among the hundreds of thousands of DotNetNuke users you’ll find WebMatrix useful as you’ll be able to build your DNN site locally and test it completely within IIS and then publish it to a hosting account and have WebMatrix migrate the site files and database for you all auto-magically!

3. Ruslan’s Blog on IIS.NET – Installing PHP Applications with WebMatrix

Most PHP development is done on top of a windows desktop machine by PHP developers. However, they’re usually installing some Apache, MySQL and PHP stack on their machine and cluttering it up. With WebMatrix and it’s built in IIS developer express, you’re able to leverage it as a lean and mean PHP development machine and not only build and test PHP apps locally but deploy them and know they’ll work exactly as they did in development because you’re using IIS for both.  Ruslan has a great tutorial using WebMatrix with PHP applications as well as a number of blog articles around PHP on Windows and the work Microsoft has been doing to make PHP run so well on Windows.

4. Mikesdotnetting – WebMatrix and jQuery Forms.

This is a great article that talks about leveraging jQuery and AJAX in ASP.NET WebPages (Razor). Mike’s actually taken WebMatrix and written a series of popular blog articles around Razor and WebMatrix including one on WebGrid.

5. From IIS.NET – Using the Command Line to run a WebMatrix site or manage IIS Developer Express

What I love about this article is that it gives you a glimpse into the inner workings of iisexpress and shows you how to do things like launching a site with a customer applicationhost.config file, running a site from another folder and even over port 80. Oh and if you’re not an avid fan of the command line, fear not.. They have an article on managing sites via the windows system tray too.

6. The ASP.NET Website’s list of video tutorials and articles on WebMatrix and ASP.NET WebPages (Razor)

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the ASP.NET site’s WebMatrix resources. There’s a ton of information here from video tutorials to HTML tutorials.

7. From IIS.NET – Make your Website SEO Friendly

This article gives a great overview of the SEO capabilities of WebMatrix.  It will tell you specific problems with your site that will impact your search engine rankings.  Not only that, but you can run the same reports against your competitors to see how you stack up.

Only 7, Is that it?

So you’re probably thinking, what? 7 sites? that’s it. Well not entirely, but this is a beta offering and still very early in the process. There are some other sites I’d always recommend like ScottGu’s Blog and Scott Hanselman’s Blog.  I’d also recommend checking out James Senior’s video about the OData Helper they’ve released for WebMatrix and how you can leverage OData. In James’s example he pulled a list of Netflix videos and displayed it with just a couple lines of code.

But hey, these are only the sites we found and I’m sure you know of others out there as well. So if want to comment with your favorite we’ll be sure to update the list.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Last month we announced the AppliedI Labs environment along with a partnership we’re running with Microsoft to provide free hosting for the WebMatrix Beta tool.  When signing up for an account you’d have to work with a URL like: http://mydomain.web##.appliedi-labs.net and although this allowed you to experience WebMatrix, ASP.NET Web Pages (Razor) and a slew of other new technologies, you had to redirect visitors to this obscure, difficult to type URL.

Today, I’m pleased to announce that you can now add domain aliases to your WebMatrix Beta account and want to step you through the process of how you’d do this.

How to point your domain at your WebMatrix Beta account

Step 1. Log into your control panel at http://control.appliedi-labs.net

Step 2. Select Domains & then click Add Domain

Step 3. Select Domain Alias

Step 4. Enter your domain or hostname.

If you want to point a subdomain like webmatrix.yourdomain.com you’d do it like this:

If you want to point your actual domain like www.yourdomain.com you’d do it like this:

Step 5. Add the point

Step 6. Update DNS for your domain.

This part is the tricky part. You’ll need to update the DNS host A record for your domain or hostname to point to the IP address: 66.252.238.19.  This will be done with either your hosting provider your domain registrar. 

NOTE: We’re not providing DNS hosting for the AppliedI-Labs environment, you will need to have DNS services served by some other party. If you’re domain you’re pointing is hosted with Applied Innovations for your regular domain though, we’d be happy to help you out with getting this setup

Things to remember

1. 1. This is not a production environment and not subject to our 100% uptime guarantee. You need to understand this is a beta hosting environment and as such may experience outages not normal in a production environment.
2. 2. While it’s safe to point your domain at your AppliedI Labs account (I’m doing this today with http://jesscoburn.com), we won’t provide standard level support, backup services or uptime guarantees for domains hosted in the AppliedI-Labs. If you’re going to point your domain at these servers you need to understand you do so at your own risk.
3. 3. The AppliedI-Labs services are scheduled to be reset shortly after 12/31/10. Anything hosted here will be deleted at that time.
4. 4. You are required to abide by our terms of service. If we find hosted domains are being exploited, abused or misused we will suspend said services promptly.
5. 5. Support for AppliedI Labs hosted website can be found in the community setup for this service at:  http://community.appliedi.net/forumdisplay.php?10-WebMatrix-Hosting-Beta

I hope you’ll find this new addition to the labs exciting and join me in hosting personal production websites in this arena. Our hope is to generate substantial traffic to these servers and really benchmark their performance with real world traffic.

Popularity: 13% [?]

As  a company that has focused exclusively on Windows hosting since 1999, we’re quick to support the Windows Hosting ecosystem.  I’m pleased to announce that Applied Innovations is powering the official demo portal for the open-source control panel project WebsitePanel on our Windows Cloud Servers platform.

You can experience WebsitePanel first hand before downloading and installing it by visiting:

http://demo.websitepanel.net

• Admin User Demo Login: demo_admin Password: password
• Reseller User Demo Login: demo_reseller Password: password
• Regular User Demo  Login: demo_user Password: password
• Exchange Demo Login: demo_exchange Password: password

Popularity: 35% [?]

One of the great features of AppliedI-Labs is that we’re able to load new technology onto servers extremely early.  I’m pleased to announce that just a couple days ago the Microsoft Drivers for PHP for SQL Server 2.0 were released and are already available on our AppliedI-Labs environment and will soon be made available across all of our production servers.  Included in this release is support for PHP Data Objects (PDO), the ability to leverage SQL Server’s Reporting Services and Business Intelligence capabilities and the ability to connect to SQL Azure.

If you want to learn more about the new PHP drivers for SQL Server:

• Microsoft SQL Server Driver for PHP Team Blog
• SQL Server Reporting Services SDK for PHP
• Official Documentation on MSDN

If you want to test out the new PHP drivers today:

• You can install it locally as part of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (WebPI)
• You can download it directly from Microsoft MSDN Downloads.
• You can signup for a WebMatrix Hosting Beta account with Applied Innovations and try it out in our sandboxed AppliedI-Labs environment.

Popularity: 9% [?]

I’m pleased to announce support for IIS Media Services 4.0 including: Smooth Streaming Presentations, Web Playlists and Bit Rate Throttling has been enabled in the AppliedI Labs environment.  At the core of the AppliedI Labs mission is to provide you with early access to the latest beta technologies and innovations so you can begin experimenting with them and planning how they’ll fit into your online business strategy.

What is IIS Media Services, in a nutshell.

IIS Media Services is an intelligent new way to deliver media over HTTP. In the past when you wanted to stream video over the Internet it required the use of special media servers running on special ports that required special firewall rules, etc.   You’d then provide your visitors with multiple links to the videos with different qualities, Dial-up, ISDN, Broadband, T-1, etc.  The problem here is that you were making your visitor think, they had to make sure they supported your media server format and then figure out what type of connection, etc.  IIS Media Services (and Smooth Streaming) makes it easier for you (and your visitors).  With Smooth Streaming you encode the video one time for the Internet and it automatically encodes the video at multiple bit-rates and you provide ONE link to your visitor. It automatically adjusts the quality of the video based on the speed of their network connection and should their network connection change speed then the video bit-rate is automatically adjusted to compensate for these changes.

That’s not exactly a full description of IIS Media Services but it gives you a general idea of the power of this new technology.

The components that make up IIS Media Services include:

• Bit Rate Throttling – throttles the amount of video that is sent over the Internet when someone requests a video from your web server. In the past if someone requested a 100MB video, your server would deliver the full 100MB of video. If this person only watched 10MB of this video file, you still sent out the full 100MB of video and YOU WERE BILLED for the full 100MB of video. Bit Rate Throttling, makes sure that doesn’t happen and only sends enough of video to keep the playback smooth.  Best of all Bit Rate Throttling can be used with 11 common media formats including: .asf, .avi, .flv, .m4v, .mov, .mp3, .mp4, .rm, .rmvb, .wma and .wmv.
• Web Playlists – Web Playlists allow you to create video playlists that will play your videos in the sequence you define and allow you to block the viewer from skipping past advertising content. It also allows you to obfuscate the actual location of your video content so visitors can’t just download your videos and includes the ability to import client-side playlists (.asx) and convert them to Web Playlists (.isx).  Web Playlists also supports the same 11 common media formats.
• Smooth Streaming – provides adaptive streaming of on-demand media over HTTP to Silverlight and other clients over HTTP. With IIS Media Services 4.0 you can now also stream HTML5 videos to mobile devices from the likes of Apple and others (yes you can stream video to your iphone, ipad and I believe your android too!).  What’s great about smooth streaming though is the user experience.  In the past when you watched a video over the Internet from time to time the video would stutter or pause and have to ‘cache’. This was usually caused because of poor network connectivity, congestion or other problems.  Today with Smooth Streaming the server automatically adjusts the quality of the video for you should you experience a network problem and keeps the moving streaming .. smoothly! (get it? Smooth Streaming..).
• Live Smooth Streaming – allows you to broadcast live events in the same manner as you would broadcast on-demand videos using Smooth Streaming.  Unfortunately, we’ve decided to not enable Live Smooth Streaming support by default on AppliedI Labs accounts. If you have a need for it though please contact us to discuss your needs and intended uses.

All of this available with nothing more than a web server with the Media Services extension loaded on it. Best of all, it is supported in your AppliedI Labs environment today!

What’s new in IIS Media Services 4.0?

I decided to use the explanation of what’s new in IIS Media Services 4.0 from Alex Zambelli’s Silverlight Blog:

Though only a beta, this new release of IIS MS 4.0 delivers one particularly awesome feature: it can deliver Smooth Streaming H.264/AAC content to Apple “iDevices” such as the iPhone and iPad. How does it do that? Both formats support H.264 video and AAC audio; Smooth Streaming is based on MP4 (ISO Base Media) file format, while Apple Live HTTP Streaming is based on MPEG-2 TS file format. Smooth Streaming tends to use short GOP chunks (2 seconds), while Apple HTTP streaming uses long GOP (10 second) chunks. Therefore, converting between the 2 formats merely requires transmuxing A/V streams from one format to another, and this is exactly what IISMS 4.0 does: it dynamically transmuxes Smooth Streaming format into Apple’s Live HTTP Streaming format. No re-encoding.

If you want to learn more about IIS Media Services 4.0 I’d recommend the following links:

1. The IIS.NET Media Services website.
2. The IIS.NET Integrated Media Platform Overview.
3. Alex Zambelli’s Blog
4. Chris Knowlton’s Blog
5. John Deutscher’s blog (John was especially helpful in helping me encode videos using the IIS Transform Manager and we’ll blog about that another time).

Why Video? Why should I want to do Video?

Today, successful online marketers are winning because of video websites like YouTube.  With the abundance of broadband internet connections today, online video has become extremely high quality and thanks to new innovations in software and hardware just about anyone can shoot HD video and stream it on the Internet.  But more important than that, search engines are including video results in their first page of results and it’s providing another way for you to gain access to the first page of search engines like Google.  In fact, here’s a few statistics on YouTube from viralblog.com:

1. YouTube exceeds 2 billion views a day. That’s nearly double the prime-time audience of all 3 major U.S. broadcast networks combined
2. 24 hours of video is uploaded every minute to YouTube!
3. the Average person spends 15 minutes a day on YouTube
4. More video is uploaded to YouTube in 60 days than all 3 major US networks created in 60 years!

An Example of Smooth Streaming from the Labs

So this is article is about video and what you can do, so let’s jump right to the videos.  If you visit: http://demo.web01.appliedi-labs.net/smoothstreaming/default.html you’ll see a video we recently recorded that is now playing back via Smooth Streaming (on the labs) in the silverlight player.  But what if you’re reading this article from your new iPad? Don’t worry.. we have the same video available for Apple iDevices at: http://demo.web01.appliedi-labs.net/smoothstreaming/apple.html

But if you’ve ever watched a video about Smooth Streaming then you’ve no doubt seen Big Buck Bunny and we have available, from the Labs, the Big Buck Bunny UXSimulator. This video is played back in a special silverlight client:

What this client does is allows you to set the “Max Bit Rate” that the video can be downloaded at ranging from around 2.5Mbps down to about 300Kbps.  It shows you the bandwidth rate at which the video is being downloaded at as well as the Frame Rate the video is playing back at.  You can watch as it increases the bit rate initially and streams in full HD (and on my home connection at 24 fps) and then as you adjust the “Max Bit Rate” you can watch the video quality adjust based on the available bandwidth. What’s really nice though is that the video never hesitates, pauses or stutters..

So Go Try it Out!

This blog post is just a small sample of what can be done with your AppliedI-Labs account now that the IIS Media Services 4.0 Beta is available on it and there’s so much more you can do with it.  If you haven’t signed up for the AppliedI-Labs yet, you can do so by signing up for the WebMatrix Hosting promotion we have going on today and get a full blown AppliedI-Labs account for free until the end of the year!  If you deploy videos on your Labs account, please feel free to post a link to it in the comments of this blog!

Popularity: 21% [?]

A couple weeks ago we ‘launched’ the AppliedI Labs as the infrastructure supporting a new beta web development tool from Microsoft, WebMatrix. We decided we’d launch the AppliedI Labs and the WebMatrix Hosting Beta side-by-side because this would give our customers an opportunity to fully understand the AppliedI Labs environment and see firsthand just what we intend to accomplish with this new offering.  There’s been a flurry of questions around this program so I wanted to take a few minutes and discuss our intentions with this program, what we hope to achieve and the value I believe it brings to the AppliedI Customer community.

The cutting-edge not the bleeding-edge of technology

I like to think of us as a company run by technologists.  We like to stay on the cutting edge of technology and provide our clients the latest innovations and technologies as they become available.  By giving our customers early access to next generation technology as it becomes available our customers are able to immediately become familiar with this technology and start to integrate it into their plans for their business and website strategies. 

I believe this provides our customers a competitive advantage that otherwise wouldn’t be available.   I believe this approach allows us to keep our customers safely on the cutting-edge of technology and not on the bleeding-edge of technology.

What’s in it for You, the hosting customer

In the past, customers would frequently ask if they could get access to new technology previews, betas (and sometimes early alphas!) as they become available. They’ll see someone like ScottGu or Hanselman blogging about these technologies and wonder “hey, maybe I can use that on my hosting account”.  Unfortunately, with a production hosting environment we’re restricted from deploying beta anything in our production hosting environments! We simply can’t take a shared hosting server that’s powering someone’s ecommerce website (and usually the very core of their business) and mix in non-production ready modules:

Production Environment + Beta Components = Bad Things Happen

By deploying the AppliedI Labs though we’re able give our customers the best of both worlds: A pristine, always-on, always available production environment for their websites and a lab environment where they can evaluate and experiment with the new technologies without impacting the performance or stability of their websites and business.

What’s in it for AppliedI, the hosting company

As a hosting company we also have to evaluate these new technologies early before they ever go into production. Because we focus on performance, security and reliability, we need to know the impact this new technology will have on our hosting infrastructure and plan for it accordingly.  We run an internal beta environment that emulates our production environment and test these new technologies before we ever put them into production.  Unfortunately, with an internal beta environment we’re only able to send so much traffic at these servers and test just so many scenarios and inevitably there will be a customer that will have some setup that we simply couldn’t plan for or predict and havoc ensues for us and that customer. With the labs environment we’re able to get the help of our clients to actually validate the new technology! Instead of testing the new changes with a couple dozen testers we can have hundreds or even thousands of testers! It’s truly a win-win for everyone.

We also believe this continues to separate us from other hosting companies. Applied Innovation is focused on providing the best performing web platform while providing our clients access to the latest technologies in a way that’s easy to use and easy to understand. By providing our customers access to the AppliedI Labs we’re accomplishing all of these objects.

So what’s being testing today and why?

Today here’s a couple of the things we’re testing and why..

WebsitePanel – WebsitePanel is the control panel solution that powers the AppliedI Labs.

We’ve outgrown our existing control panel system (HELM by Web Host Automation originally and now Parallels) and we’ve been evaluating a full range of options for our control panel solution over the past year. We realized to really remain out in front we would need to develop our own control panel and had begun that process when DotNetPanel became an open-source project know known as WebsitePanel. Something the labs will provide us is the ability to test this new control panel system in a pseudo-production environment where we can have a large number of customers (AKA testers) provide us feedback on it’s functionality and performance. Most hosters build their control panel based on what their internal teams need, this allows us to build our solution around our customers’ needs and integrate their feedback in that process.

The AppliedI Dynamic Server Cloud – The hosting infrastructure that powers the AppliedI Labs.

It’s no secret we’ve built a pretty amazing virtualization platform that’s highly-available, highly-scalable, flexible, managed virtual dedicated server infrastructure on top of Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V and the System Center suite. Whether you call it VPS servers, VMs, virtual dedicated servers, cloud servers, clustered virtual servers, managed virtual dedicated servers, whatever.  At the end of the day it’s an awesome managed hosting infrastructure that eclipses anything available today.  What makes it awesome? It’s features like:

• Failover clustering – so when a single hardware node fails, the workload falls over to another node in the cluster and virtually eliminates any downtime
• Dynamic scalability – the ability to increase the number of CPUs, amount of memory and disk storage on the fly when needed allows you to always have just the right amount of server resources you need when you need it and allows you to scale back down just as easily!
• Redundant and fast performing storage – we decided to leverage several of the largest Dell Equallogic SANs available and spread the storage across an array of 48 drives and is highly redundant providing both safe and fast storage that dominates local storage options. Today most providers are going with less expensive direct attached storage but we found this to be the best in performance and went for it!
• Proactive Monitoring and OS Updates – with the System Center suite of tools integrated so tightly with the platform and the operating system we’re able to get a level of monitoring and reporting that just isn’t available with competing platforms.
• Increased Server Security and Performance – by leveraging Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V being so tightly integrated, we’re able to provide an added layer of security and isolation to every server that wasn’t available previously. Let’s face it, if you’re going to run a Microsoft operating system, the only virtualization stack to use is going to be a Microsoft virtualization stack!
• and a great cost savings! – You see our clients only need to pay for the resources they’re using. If it’s the busy season they ramp up their server hardware adding more memory and CPU’s and then when the season is over they ramp back down to just the minimum. Some of our clients are saving THOUSANDS every month because of this dynamic flexibility!

So we have thousands of customers deployed on top of our ‘cloud’ today and we know our customers are benefiting from it and love it. And we were jealous..

We’ve wanted to deploy our own shared hosting infrastructure on top of our ‘cloud’ but needed to be able to test this before we put any customers on it!  So, yes the labs are running on top of our ‘cloud’ and with a few hundred customers accessing it regularly the performance is FANTASTIC and I suspect we’ll be moving in this direction soon enough.

A Bunch of New Microsoft Betas!

After all, that’s the main reason of the labs right?  But the list is just too long for this blog article. Watch for more articles to come soon.

So that’s the Labs, Join us today!

So that’s what all this labs stuff is about. If you haven’t tried it out yet, I’d recommend you try out the WebMatrix Hosting beta we’re doing today and give it a run. We’ll be providing free hosting for these customers until the end of the year at which time all customers will have the opportunity to transition to production hosting if they like.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Outside of the Applied Innovations staff, few people know this. One of the reasons I started Applied Innovations was because I had been doing web development for a handful of local companies and understood the frustration these companies were feeling with their hosting providers.

I noticed that the companies these customers of mine were working with often held their customers captive and would demand outrageous fees to help with the simplest tasks. I thought, “C’mon doesn’t anyone offer a hosting service that actually cares about the customers success?” It seemed to me that these businesses didn’t realize that if their customers succeeded and grew that the hosting company would also succeed! It’s a simple business concept, help your customers and your business will grow, but no one was making it happen.

This is the concept that Applied Innovations was founded on. Help your customers grow and succeed and you too will grow and succeed. Every day we build on that concept and today is no exception as we’re launching a Customer Advisory Panel.

What is a Customer Advisory Panel?

Today, we’re taking that caring approach our company was founded on a bit further. We’re organizing a Customer Advisory Panel. This will be a subset of our customers from our various business units helping us to understand their business and their needs and in turn helping to drive the direction our services and product offerings take.

Why Join the Customer Advisory Panel? What’s in it for me?

So let’s cut to the chase, what’s in it for you? Why should you help? It’s simple, Applied Innovations is a customer focused business and as such we listen to our customers and provide the services and products that our customers ask for. By participating in the Customer Advisory Panel, you’ll have a bigger say in the direction these products and services take. You’ll be able to voice your own business needs and that of businesses like yours and make sure the services we provide address your needs!

It’s pretty simple really, you get to tell us what you want. Then you’ll get early access to these new services and products and provide us feedback across topics like: features, functionality and price! You’ll get to make sure we’re meeting the needs of your business and the businesses like you and have a bigger say in what we do.

What’s Required of me on the Customer Advisory Panel?

If you decide to participate, you’ll be asked to take a survey from time to time and we may have you speak with one of our product managers or our executives from time to time. You’ll get early access to new products, services and betas before our other customers do and you’ll have the ability to provide direct feedback in these services ranging from features and functionality to price.

I don’t believe you’ll find it distracting and I think you’ll actually enjoy it. What kind of services? Well this is hard to say but here’s some ideas:

• We’re thinking about launching an online backup service. You’d get free access to the tools and be able to test it out for a few weeks. You’ll ultimately help us decide if this is a service our customers would benefit from and if so what would be a reasonable price for this service.
• Another service we’re talking about launching is email push services to smart phones. This is similar to the features in exchange but without the large price tag! You’ll get this service enabled for free during the beta period and then help us determine if it’s useful to you or just a novelty.

Most importantly though, you’re not required to have web hosting experience! You know your business and you know your business needs and I’m betting there’s plenty of businesses out there just like you with the same needs. That’s what we want, you to be an expert on you!

Why’s Applied Innovations doing this? What’s in it for AppliedI?

It’s this feedback that we hope to receive that will allow us to focus on services that our customers actually want and ultimately are willing to purchase. You’ll gain solutions to your business needs and help us focus exclusively on the services and products that bring value to you and your business! At the end of the day, you’ll be helping us to launch only services that help you and we won’t waste time investigating or bringing services to market that don’t help you or bring value to your business. It’s a win for everyone!

Sounds Great, how do I start?

The first thing you need to do is take our current Customer Survey. This is the type of surveys we’ll be asking you to participate in from time to time.

This current survey is meant to help us better understand our customers and why they opted for the service they’re currently on. It’s segmented based on the type of service you have and if you have more than one of these services with us (for example, if you have shared hosting accounts and a dedicated server) feel free to take each survey that relates to you.

• Shared Hosting Customers: take this survey.
• Shared Hosting Resellers: take this survey.
• VPS Hosting Customers: take this survey.
• Dedicated Hosting Customers: take this survey.

We’ll be closing this round of surveys out in the next week so hurry up before it’s too late. As a thank you for taking this survey, I’ll make sure you get a Free Travel Mug and you’ll be entered into a drawing to receive a $100 Amazon Gift Certificate! It’s a pretty good deal for taking 5 minutes of your time.

If you decide you don’t want to join the Customer Advisory Panel then I hope you’ll still take this survey. It will be a tremendous help to us.

Best Regards – Jess

Popularity: 11% [?]

Earlier today Scott Guthrie (ScottGu), Corporate VP of Microsoft Developer Division, announced WebsiteSpark and I’m pleased to announce Applied Innovations is offering WebsiteSpark hosting as a hosting partner and network partner.  If your company’s primary business is Web development or Web design you can signup immediately from our website.

Visibility, support and software for professional Web Developers and Designers – at no upfront cost!

WebsiteSpark is a new program designed by Microsoft to ‘Spark’ the development and growth of independent web development and web design firms that build applications and websites for other companies.  WebsiteSpark provides eligible companies THREE YEARS of no cost software licenses. Once a company is enrolled in the program they’ll receive:

Free Software Licenses for Developers

• 3 licenses of Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
• 1 license of Expression Studio 3 (which includes Expression Blend, Sketchflow, and Web)
• 2 licenses of Expression Web 3
• 4 processor licenses of Windows Web Server 2008 R2
• 4 processor licenses of SQL Server 2008 Web Edition
• DotNetPanel control panel (enabling easy remote/hosted management of your servers)

Free Support, Training and Assistance

• Two technical support incidents per program membership
• Training events and activities
• Unlimited access to technical manage newsgroups on MSDN
• Unlimited program support for non-technical issues
• Access to broad community support though connections with Network Partners, Hosting Partners, and peers with complementary services and technologies

Free Marketing Assistance and Lead Generation

• They’ll also receive unique lead generation opportunities and listing in the WebsiteSpark marketplace.

Exclusive Hosting Discounts and Promotional Pricing

• As part of the WebsiteSpark program, companies will receive exclusive WebsiteSpark  discounts on Windows Web Hosting services from Applied Innovations.

Empowering innovation on Microsoft’s most powerful Web Platform to date.

Applied Innovations is pleased to be one of the first web hosting companies invited to be a member of the WebsiteSpark program and excited to be able to deliver even more value and innovation to our core customer base: web developers and web designers.

We believe combining our web hosting service with the Microsoft WebsiteSpark program will provide you the best value and most reliable, experienced and innovative hosting available today.  If you want to learn more about WebsiteSpark, please feel free to contact sales@appliedi.net. If you’re ready to signup for WebsiteSpark now, visit the WebsiteSpark portal and during signup be certain to select Applied Innovations as your hosting/network partner.

Popularity: 46% [?]

Bad news: There’s a Zero Day Attack on Microsoft’s IIS FTP Server

There’s a new vulnerability exposed in Microsoft’s IIS FTP server where it contains a stack buffer overflow in the handling of directory names which could allow a remote attack to execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable server.  Now before you go off thinking “great, Microsoft isn’t secure” that’s not that case at all. This type of vulnerability is very common and happens in all kinds of applications.   What’s uncommon about this attack and what makes it ‘zero day’ is that it was just announced as a vulnerability and Microsoft hasn’t had an opportunity to patch against it yet.

You can learn more about this vulnerability at the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team’s site: https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/276653

Good news: You’re Zero Day PROTECTED already!

We have installed on our network what we believe to be the best network security devices available on the market today and they’re already doing there job!  On our network is something called an Intrusion Protection Server or IPS.  The IPS is like a firewall that works to block application attacks and vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows, SQL injection, etc.   The IPS vendor we use has a strong relationship with Microsoft and as such had this vulnerability protected ZERO DAY.   Had we not had this device in place the only way to effectively protect against this attack would have been to disable FTP writes and that would have been disastrous!

This is an example of what separates a good hosting provider for every other hosting provider out there.  We know you selected us as your hosting provider because you want us to do the hosting and handle headaches like this for you so you could concentrate on your business and building value for your customers.   You didn’t know there was a vulnerability and now because we’re doing what you’ve asked us to do, you don’t care there’s a vulnerability because you’re protected already.

Thanks for selecting Applied Innovations as your Windows Hosting Provider.

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KickStartz.com is a unique idea to help foster innovation and entrepreneurship. It’s about getting together everything required to take an idea and convert it into a business in one location and then working together as a team over a solid weekend from the early morning hours to the late evening hours to make it happen. In a period of just 3 days teams will be built from Application Developers, Businessmen and even students to select an idea and get the business for that idea off to a running start. On site will be all the resources these individuals will need to make it all happen.

Applied Innovations is sponsoring the event as web hosting provider and lending our own expertise in online business and e-commerce to help these businesses get up and running.

If you have any questions about Kickstartz or are interesting in putting together a similar idea in your own area, We’d highly recommend contacting Marc over at KickStartz.com.  This is a great idea and we’re excited to be a part of the first Kickstartz event.

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