Prior to ARR, Windows hosting users had few alternatives to address site scalability and reliability issues.  Common examples were:

• DNS (round robin) requests
  • Easy to implement, but does not address reliability concerns
• Windows Network Load Balancing (NLB)
  • Limited control and functionality and doesn’t fully address reliability concerns
• Dedicated load balancing appliance
  • Cost prohibitive for most customers

Built on top of IIS 7, ARR provides a feature rich and robust environment including support for caching, compression, web service (application) health monitoring and SSL offloading. ARR is quick to setup (typically minutes) and can be deployed using either a virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated server.  Further, ARR can be combined with NLB to provide a truly fault tolerant and highly available solution.

How can ARR work for you?

Let’s say you’ve got a big promotion, sale or seasonal event coming up (hint hint). You want to make sure your site is online and available for all your customers.  It’s easy to do with ARR!

A typical ARR implementation:

ARR is placed in front of two or more application (WEB) servers.  These servers can be comprised of any mix of shared, VPS or dedicated hosting.  VPS’s are are very popular because they utilize our highly available and clustered Hyper-V Powered VPS Hosting.  These are a perfect fit for web and application servers like ARR that need to be able to quickly scale up or out.

ARR offers different load balancing algorithms to distribute traffic such as round-robin, total traffic and least server response time along with custom distribution options. Once deployed, ARR monitors the health of the servers within it’s web farm.  Should the web service fail or degrade, ARR stops sending traffic to that server until the issue has been resolved.  This health checking functionality, previously only available on high end dedicated load balancing appliances, overcomes the limitations and drawbacks of other methods like DNS round-robin and NLB.

Additionally, ARR provides content caching, compression and SSL offloading.  This means commonly accessed web pages (dynamic or static) are served from cache by the ARR server and the web servers providing a significant performance boost! To further augment performance, all SSL requests can also be handled by the ARR server.

Customers have been using ARR with great success!

They love the flexibility, reliability, cost and most importantly the increased revenues they typically see since their site is available for their customers.  Because ARR is built on top of IIS 7 it requires no additional licenses or fees and is very easy to manage.  Once setup, typical interaction with ARR is minimal. Be sure to check out this story.

If you’d like to discuss your needs and how we can help you scale your website, please contact us any time!

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.

Applied Innovations Innovates with Cloud Offering

As the saying goes “Rome was not built in a day” and neither is our new offering that continues to be developed and refined and we believe over the coming weeks will help define the future of Windows Web Hosting.

With our Windows 2003 VPS servers, developers get a semi-managed hosting experience for free. You see, OS updates and security patches are handled at the hardware node so the developer doesn’t have to worry about rushing to his server on patch Tuesday and updating his server. Another benefit is anti-virus is automatically managed on the host node so he doesn’t have to worry about nasties getting dropped on his server.

But most importantly, Joe now has full control of his hosting environment, he can install SQLexpress and IIS and configure them anyway he wants. He can go download the latest beta software and install it on the server. He can tweak the .NET Framework and configuration files, ANYWAY HIS HEART DESIRES. He can also remotely start, stop, reboot, backup and restore his VPS server anytime he pleases.   His server is his own personal domain and he’s the master of his domain!

Joe’s Review

Joe published a review of his experience getting started on his VPS and also pointed out a few tips to help other developers looking to migrate out of shared hosting and into VPS hosting.  We fealt Joe’s comments were very useful and wanted to publish them here and also add some additional information for other VPS administrators. 

You’ll find Joe’s comments below indented and italicized and then my comments not indented. Hopefully it’s not too hard to read.

[Joe's] dummies guide to getting your own virtual server configured (cut 1.0)
I’m sure jess or someone will mod this up once they read it

step1 :: get my VPS setup – basically Applied-I took care of the server setup after listening to what I want. Infrastructure guys scare me, but they took it easy on me.

This was the easy part actually. The important thing to decide when you first get a VPS server (or dedicated server for that matter) is what you’re going to run on your VPS. If you’re not comfortable administering IIS or plan to add a lot of sites you’re probably going to want a control panel installed. The good thing about a control panel is once it’s installed and configured, it’s going to save you alot of time and headaches. Each site will be setup identical to the others and you’ll avoid fat fingered mistakes. The downside to installing a control panel is it’s going to eat up memory that you probably don’t want to lose. You can figure 150-300MB of memory for your control panel to run so make sure you have enough memory in your VPS.

My recommendation is if you’re comfortable managing IIS and securing it, go without the control panel. If you’re new to IIS and administering a server, get the control panel. The headaches it will save will be well worth it.  Most developers also immediately install SQLexpress, I’d advise you to consider a shared SQL database instead but if you must have SQLexpress make sure you set a memory limit on it or you’ll soon find all your server’s memory used up.

step2 :: get stuff to the server – I still use ftp. With IIS7 I’ll go to secure ftp, but ftp was an easy way to get file in and out of the box. I setup a separate ftp address for each domain running on the box and used isolated ftp to map it.  Good instructions for Isolated FTP can be found here -> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555018/en-us

FTP is simple and easy to use. I personally like to map my local drive in terminal services and drag and drop files between my local drive and my personal vps server. It’s easier for me but your mileage may vary.  Windows includes a pretty good FTP server by default but a lot of people are starting to opt for the filezilla ftp server which is opensource and supports secure FTP already.

step3 :: setup the vdir – Create a new website in IIS manager – Setup the host headers in IIS – add in www.devfish.com / devfish.com / www.devfish.net / devfish.net to the host headers – give NETWORK SERVICE security rights to the directory we are going to be using – don’t forget to change the asp.net setting to the right framework version – useful link : http://www.iisanswers.com/articles/dns_for_iis.htm

Host headers are great, a lot of people are still against running sites on host headers because they’re concerned how search engines will see their sites. However, all of the major search engines have come out and said host headers are not a problem. So this is your choice.

Personally, I only use a unique IP on a site when it’s going to run SSL or is going to have many domains pointed to it. Let’s say you have 100 domains you wanted to point at one site, adding all host headers is going to take a couple hours but if you run the site on a unique IP address and only put a binding in for the IP address then you just need to make sure all your host records in the domain’s dns server point to the proper IP and you’re all set. 

One more tip here, if you notice Joe has www.devfish.com, devfish.com, www.devfish.net and devfish.net pointed at his site. The thing is pagerank is still considered pretty important by many people and you generally want everyone linking to your site with just one url. With multiple urls pointing to your website your page rank is going to be split among all those domains/urls. I’d recommend using something like isapi-rewrite from www.helicontech.com and creating 301 redirects. Ofcourse you can also use ASP.NET HTTP Handlers and generate those 301′s assuming your app runs in ASP.net. This way your pagerank isn’t split up. If you want to see an example go to www.applied-innovations.com/blog and www.appliedi.net/blog and pay attention to the url bar. You’ll see they redirect to one url.

Another thing you should consider if you’re running your own web server and hosting more than one domain is using unique application pools and unique anonymous users for each website. By using the unique application pool if one site crashes and takes down the application pool it doesn’t affect the other sites and by using unique usersy if one domain gets compromised (for whatever reason) the user won’t have access to the files of the other websites.  

step4 :: move some content up – Copy up the latest devfish code up to the site. I also took this chance to move to vs2008 on .net 2.0, as well as integrate gatineau into my pages. Browse it from IIS manager, make sure it all works.

A few months back Microsoft purchased livestats from deepmetrix, I’ve been waiting to see what’s coming of that and looks like it’s gatineau. Definitely signup for the beta on that one. I think we’ll see it give google analytics a run for it’s money.

step5 :: redirect my dns – pointed my dns records at f="http://www.worldwidedns.net">www.worldwidedns.net to new vdir – wait 30 minutes – then test it out

This goes back to what I mentioned about decide what you want to run on your VPS. You can run DNS on your VPS if you want or you can use an outside service. In Joe’s case he decided to keep his server lean and mean and used an outside DNS server instead of running DNS on his VPS.

What next? Lots of overhauls I want to do (yes, I know my website looknfeel sux), but first the fish must swim to .NET 3.5. Main concern here will be some of the funky web.config I’ve got and moving some of the ajax stuff over to 3.5 (aka ripping out web.config junkieness and cleaning it up). Shouldn’t be a big deal, but it is a testing situation.

I left this part because I think there’s one more step Joe should do, configure windows firewall. But be careful you don’t want to block terminal services (if you do though it’s an easy fix, just go into the VZPP and stop the services).  Here’s my super secret recipe for configuring Windows Firewall. Open a dos command and copy and paste this block of text into the window it will set exceptions and then start the firewall.

  netsh firewall set opmode enable
  netsh firewall set portopening TCP 80 HTTP
  netsh firewall set portopening TCP 53 DNS-TCP
  netsh firewall set portopening UDP 53 DNS-UDP
  netsh firewall set portopening TCP 21 FTP-Server
  netsh firewall set portopening TCP 220 IMAP3
  netsh firewall set portopening TCP 143 IMAP4
  netsh firewall set portopening TCP 25 SMTP
  netsh firewall set portopening TCP 110 POP3
  netsh firewall set portopening TCP 3389 RDP
  netsh firewall set portopening TCP 443 HTTPS
  netsh firewall set portopening TCP 9999 SmarterMail
  netsh firewall set portopening TCP 9998 SmarterStats
  netsh firewall set logging droppedpackets=enable
 

This is by no means a perfect set of firewall rules and will need to be tweaked for your own needs but it will get the most common ports open and leave closed the really nasty ports (445, 137-139, 1433, 3306, etc) to the outside world and will also create a logfile in c:\windows\pfirewall.log so you can see what gets dropped/filtered by the firewall and don’t worry in Windows 2003 firewall rules only affect incoming traffic not outgoing traffic. Oh and if you have plesk (or any of the other modern control panels), it can handle managing the firewall for you from it’s web interface.

Closing

Virtual Private Servers are revolutionizing all aspects of the computer industry and the hosting industry is no exception. We’re excited to be a leader in Windows 2003 VPS Hosting and are glad to be able to help developers like Joe and yourself to find the perfect hosting environment. If you have any questions about Windows VPS Hosting please don’t hesitate to ask.